And there’s a sleek, muscular modernity about the arrangements, mostly recorded with such Bowie stalwarts as guitarist Gerry Leonard, bassist Gail Anne Dorsey and drummer Zachary Alford, with telling contributions from rock guitarist Earl Slick and avant-rock soundscape guitarist David Torn. Track-by-track verdicts 
 
 The Next Day 
 
 Supposedly written about some medieval tyrant, the title track employs a stalking funk-rock groove striated with angular, trebly guitars and bound to marching strings to depict a figure pursued by a baying mob who “can’t get enough of that doomsday song” and who can “work with Satan while they dance like saints”. I’d Rather Be High 
 
 Set to a jazzy shuffle bound with a sinuous guitar line, this finds one of the poor bloody infantry regretting the youthful wrong turn that led him to his embattled foxhole: “I’d rather be flying, I’d rather be dead, than out of my head and training these guns on those men in the sand.” 
 
 Boss Of Me 
 
 The honking baritone sax from “Dirty Boys” reappears in bathetic-ironic mode to underscore the plight of a hapless lad stuck on the spike of feminism: Who’d have ever dreamed,” he marvels plaintively, “that a smalltown girl like you would be the boss of me?” 
 
 Dancing Out In Space 
 
 David Torn’s interweaving guitar whines lend a miasmic, psychedelic flavour to the prancing, Motown-style funk-rock groove of one of the album’s hookiest, catchiest trifles, a celebration of dance: “No one here can beat you/Dancing out in space.” An obvious future single. Warning: contains scenes of nudity 
 
 On the extraordinary How Does The Grass Grow he contemplates ethnic genocide with a nightmarish despair made all the more disorienting by the off-kilter exuberance of a “la la la” chorus appropriated from The Shadows’ Apache. “Oblivion shall own you, death alone shall love you.” 
 
 Heat 
 
 The album closes with the Scott Walkeresque vocal portents and apocalyptic tone and imagery of “Heat”, in which acoustic guitar, strings and guitar noise track the protagonist’s search for his own identity through intimations of guilt and shame, finally resolving into a duality that might stand as the motto for the album as a whole: “I am a seer, but I am a liar.” Which of course, is equivalent to saying “I am a storyteller.” 
 
 'The Next Day' is set for release on 11 March in standard and deluxe versions
– David Bowie's latest album—marking his return after a decade—seems to be living up to the anticipation. Sure, it's not 1970s Bowie, but critics are loving the 66-year-old's The Next Day: It "may be the greatest comeback album ever," writes Andy Gill in a five-star Independent review. "It’s certainly rare to hear a comeback effort that not only reflects an artist’s own best work, but stands alongside it in terms of quality." In the Telegraph, which also gives the album five stars, Neil McCormick can't restrain himself: It's "an absolute wonder: urgent, sharp-edged, bold, beautiful, and baffling, an intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, musically jagged, electric bolt through his own mythos and the mixed-up, celebrity-obsessed, war-torn world of the 21st century." If that weren't enough, The Next Day is "thought-provoking, strange, and filled with great songs," writes Alexis Petridis in the Guardian. Full of "inarguable tunes," the album's "success rests on simple pleasures"—though the lyrics are "so dense and allusive" you may wish you had Cliffs Notes. "It’s not Diamond Dogs or Young Americans or Low—get real, this isn’t the seventies," writes Chris Roberts at the Quietus. Still, "it’s not just good, it’s great."