“Killing a Little Time,” whose shuddering groove recalls the double-time tricks of Bowie’s mid-’90s records, includes a refrain of “I’m falling, man/I’m choking, man/I’m fading, man.” But the line that Bowie clearly relishes growling is “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing/To sting your soul/To fuck you over”-which would work just as well on somebody’s first record. Unsurprisingly, the newly released songs are full of intimations of mortality-but it’s also too easy to listen for farewells and forget that they were written for dramatic personae, by a songwriter who adored masks. The “Lazarus” performance, whose guitar riff eventually just turns into “Purple Haze,” is the strongest thing on the cast album, possibly because Bowie’s own performance wasn't casting such a long shadow. The three previously unheard Bowie recordings on the second disc, a bit under twelve minutes of music in all, are of a piece with the Blackstar material, if not as audacious or as polished as “ Blackstar” or “Lazarus” or “Sue.” “When I Met You” is the jewel-in-the-rough of the bunch-Bowie’s backing vocals body-checking his warbling lead out of the way, the band a little out of tune and too into stomping out the rhythm to care. As translations of Bowie’s musical aesthetic to theater go, Lazarus lags far behind *Hedwig and the Angry Inch-*in which Hall also starred for a while. And, despite some nicely considered arrangements (“The Man Who Sold the World” takes after Bowie’s mid-1990s reworking), a lot of these songs weren’t actually built for the stage: when Sophie Anne Caruso sings “Life on Mars?” as a scenery-chewing torch song, it’s suddenly clear how much of its power came from Bowie’s arch detachment. To put it more plainly: there is no song in Lazarus of which Bowie did not record a better version. The central problem is that Lazarus is billed as an original cast recording, and it’s kind of not it’s impossible to hear these “actorly” renditions of “Changes” and “It’s No Game” and “Love Is Lost” and so on without thinking of the cracked actor who defined them, and whose phrasing these performers ape at almost every turn. (Near the end, we hear forty seconds of his original recording of “Sound and Vision,” and it’s as if a conference room’s ceiling has momentarily peeled back to reveal the sky.) The show’s cast recorded the first disc on January 11 of this year, immediately after they’d learned of Bowie’s death, and the solemnity of the moment mutes the hypnotic delight of his songs. Bowie recorded the three new Lazarus songs during the Blackstar sessions with saxophonist Donny McCaslin and his group, but only “Lazarus” itself actually appeared on Blackstar a second disc with all three recordings has been appended to the soundtrack album.

Musical david bowie lazarus