David Bowie - Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980/2017) Hi Res

Fresh off his Berlin trilogy (Low, Heroes, Lodger), David Bowie released "Scary Monsters", an album that continued the cool, detached, electronic-flavored sound he'd been experimenting with on the aforementioned records. Robert Fripp's distinctively angular guitar style contributes greatly to the resulting Kraftwerk-flavored funk of "Fashion" and the jittery paranoia of the title track. Elsewhere, Bowie updates the saga of Major Tom with "Ashes to Ashes" and turns to Tom Verlaine for the new wave nihilism of "Kingdom Come" which also features Fripp on guitar.

Robert Fripp was far from the only great guest invited to play on "Scary Monsters". Pete Townshend's swirling guitar on "Because You're Young" made it an underrated classic in Bowie's canon. "Scary Monsters" proved to be David Bowie's last musical effort for a while as he spent the next three years pursuing a career in acting before returning to the studio in 1983 to record "Let's Dance".

David Bowie returned to relatively conventional rock & roll with Scary Monsters, an album that effectively acts as an encapsulation of all his '70s experiments. Reworking glam rock themes with avant-garde synth flourishes, and reversing the process as well, Bowie creates dense but accessible music throughout Scary Monsters. Though it doesn't have the vision of his other classic records, it wasn't designed to break new ground -- it was created as the culmination of Bowie's experimental genre-shifting of the '70s. As a result, Scary Monsters is Bowie's last great album. While the music isn't far removed from the post-punk of the early '80s, it does sound fresh, hip, and contemporary, which is something Bowie lost over the course of the '80s.