David Bowie - 1. Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper Cycle) [2LP] Vinyl Record

1. Outside is the sound of David Bowie and Brian Eno reuniting for the first time since Berlin to invent a murder mystery nobody asked for, and somehow making it work.

Bowie hadn't made a proper concept album since Diamond Dogs in 1974, and this one is stranger and more ambitious than that comparison suggests. Set inside a fictional art-crime investigation narrated through the diaries of detective Nathan Adler, the 1995 record folds in fragments of nearly every persona Bowie had ever worn, industrial noise, jazz inflections courtesy of longtime pianist Mike Garson, cut-up lyrics generated the same way Eno had pushed him to write two decades earlier. It's dense almost to the point of resistance, and that density is the whole point.

The Hearts Filthy Lesson opens the album in genuine menace, all clattering rhythm and Bowie sounding like he's narrating a crime scene from inside it. Hallo Spaceboy detonates with industrial force before its Pet Shop Boys remix later softened its edges for radio. I'm Deranged found a second life gliding through David Lynch's Lost Highway, and Strangers When We Meet closes the record on something closer to a proper song, almost tender by comparison.

Difficult, overstuffed, and decades ahead of anyone catching up to it. That was always the Bowie and Eno method.