David Bowie - Low

Always up for messing with the formal expectations of rock, Bowie teamed up with Brian Eno for three frustrating but compelling albums, starting with Low. Treated instruments are claustrophobically crowded together, and Bowie's voice leaps in and out of the mix seemingly at will. Where it seems like it might show up, it's replaced by wailing synths or nothing at all, and it vanishes altogether from most of the second half-- a series of long, menacing, barely mobile synth explorations. To prove that they could make pop out of these herky-jerky mix tricks, they pull off "Sound And Vision" in the middle of the disc, but the essence of Low is that the "star" is either absent or alarmingly in your face. --Douglas Wolk