"Scary Monsters is one of David Bowie's most fascinating records—a decade-closing album full of anger, confusion, innovation, retrenchment, theft, and sheer brilliance that's unique in his catalog. Adam Steiner digs into every aspect of it, from its songs to its art to its videos. He skillfully traces its many tributaries and listens to how it echoes throughout Bowie's later works. Anyone who's been entranced by Scary Monsters over the years will find much of interest here."
"Steiner ... takes us on the thrilling, identity-splicing journey with him, and as he does so offers a compelling, vital insight into this key Bowie album with the dexterity and insight of a novelist as well of a skilled biographer."
"Both foreshadowed destination and a point of departure, Scary Monsters is a significant staging post in Bowie’s career. Adam Steiner’s erudite book communicates the thrill of an artist meeting the times, and his past, head on."
"An insightful, expansive, and informed searchlight into the inner workings of one of the most essential recordings of Bowie's oeuvre. Beautifully conceived and written with penetrating insight."
"Steiner gathers together much significant research—covering areas of Bowie’s recording career that have been previously overlooked."
"Adam Steiner’s analysis of one of Bowie’s most charismatic yet strangely elusive albums is as compelling as it is rich in detail. It sent me straight back to the record, as the best writing on music always does. This is a fresh and vital addition to the lengthening bibliography on David Bowie’s extraordinary career."
"The 1980 album Scary Monsters is, arguably, David Bowie's masterpiece. It sums up everything Bowie had accomplished in the 1970s, but its sounds and its obsessions also foreshadow much of what Bowie would do in the decades to come. There are good reasons that every great Bowie release till his death in 2016 was called by some reviewers ‘his best album since Scary Monsters.’ In Silhouettes and Shadows, Adam Steiner provides a kaleidoscopic view of Bowie’s masterpiece. Reading Silhouettes and Shadows is like living with the album in real-time. In some chapters we are next to Bowie as he is creating the album; sometimes we are next to the photographers and artists putting together its dazzling cover; sometimes we are with the videographer shooting the groundbreaking video for "Ashes to Ashes;" sometimes we are with Steiner himself as a responsive, insightful listener to the music and lyrics of each song, and to Bowie as an artist. It's a pleasure to relive Scary Monsters in Steiner's hands!"
"Adam Steiner's Silhouettes and Shadows is the mind-bendingly fascinating story of an album and its maker at the peak of his career."
"[Steiner] details the creation of this oft-overlooked LP ... There is quite a lot to be learned within the pages of Silhouettes and Shadows."
"Steiner writes potently and poignantly of the artist’s late-'70s personal turmoil, and comes up with a workaholic inventor at a crossroads who deals with inner madness by spewing bile, grief, the tenets of unrequited love, and a goodbye to Major Tom across one tight avant-post-punk-electronic classic. That’s a lot to chew on, and Steiner does so nobly."
"Steiner's rich text brilliantly recreates the claustrophobic paranoia and relentless self-analysis of an album that seems more unsettling every time you hear it."
"Full of surprises and unexpected comments and critical revelations ... gloriously readable and informative."
"Written with a poet's love for the jumble of words, the critic's fierce interrogating eye, and the fan's love of music, Silhouettes and Shadows is an essential read for anyone who takes Bowie seriously. Steiner brings out this unique stage in Bowie's life and art in full colour and with a rich and intriguing weave of testimony old and new and fresh insights on Bowie and his incredible music."
"Adam Steiner has written an in-depth discussion of David Bowie’s ‘last great album’ … It’s a convincing argument and backed up with an in-depth analysis of the social, cultural and political landscape of the time … Steiner seems to have read everything anyone’s written about Bowie’s work, and he’s also done his own interviews too."
"Essential reading for David Bowie fans and those interested in rock-and-roll history."
07/07/2023
Steiner (Into the Never: Nine Inch Nails and the Creation of the Downward Spiral) dives deep into David Bowie's 1980 album, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), a pivotal work for him. This book describes it as a culmination of sorts that was also fresh and thrilling in its own right. Bowie dominated the 1970s with some of the most memorable work of his career, covering so many styles and genres that it seemed he could do anything. Then, competing with young upstarts he had influenced, he, naturally, wanted to take his music into the next decade. The dense book is not merely a chronicle of the songs as they are written, or the recording process, the musicians involved, and so on. Instead, the author analyzes the songs on nearly a molecular level with the eye of a poet and the detail of a historian. Steiner's description of Bowie's life during that period sets the scene for the emergence of one of his most beloved works. VERDICT This book is fascinating, but its density may be more suitable for academically-inclined music readers.—Brett Rohlwing
