http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ARvX8E0Mmk 'Station to Station', recorded in 1975 in Los Angeles, features Bowie at his most confused and desperate as a result of his well-documented cocaine addiction. Perhaps this is an understatement - the lyrical themes in the title track are occult and downright bizarre. The backdrop to these oddities is a luxuriously smooth development of his funk sound which he experimented with in 'Young Americans'. The album transitions effortlessly from upbeat to pining, and back again, before being concluded by his tender cover of 'Wild is the Wind'. Drummer Dennis Davis and bassist George Murray must take credit for the rock-solid rhythm section which provides the foundation for the meandering 10-minute epic 'Station to Station'. The song builds from a minute of distant sounds evoking some dormant monster of transportation, into a crescendo of highly structured and rhythmic guitar and piano sounds. From here, the song bursts into infectious, progressive disco with Earl Slick's lead guitar going toe-to-toe with Bowie's mature yet volatile vocals. 'Golden Years' is altogether more straightforward, both musically and lyrically. Intended as a simple, glittery love song devoted to his wife Angela, one cannot help but detect more than a hint of irony. It is well known that Bowie was utterly disenfranchised with almost everything about his life, and his time in Los Angeles was the darkest of his life. A silence lingers for several seconds as the track ends, and the synth-piano which opens 'Word on a Wing' is an entirely different beast. The sound is more desperate and reflexive; the lyrics flirt with religion and occultism. The dark, all-questioning Bowie of 1975 was crying out for some kind of salvation, religious or non, and here he is reaching out to God. This begins tentatively, but culminates in the impassioned delivery of the lyric "Oh Lord, Lord, my prayer flies like a word on a wing". Powerful indeed. Side two seems to shed Bowie's cries for help, although the sound of 'TVC-15' and 'Stay' are extensions, perhaps even refinements, of what we have heard on side one. 'TVC-15' apparently tells the story of an incident in which Iggy Pop, having dropped a copious amount of acid, hallucinated that his television was eating his girlfriend. The technological paranoia is odd, yes, but not as dark as the album's earlier fare.