2004-10-04 - 2:04 p.m.
Song Review by Richie Unterberger
One of the lesser-known songs off David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World album, "Saviour Machine" was nonetheless, like everything from that record, a quite intriguing song, and one of its more ominous. The fade-in establishes the musical backdrop: a hard rock riff that grinds away in an almost jazzy, "Take Five"-ish rhythm. When the verse starts, though, it settles into a more standard 1970 hard rock beat, Bowie starting the lyric with a detached, even merciless tone. The story, if a slim one, of "Saviour Machine" is pretty darned odd for rock music: a president named Joe who devises a savior machine whose logic stops war and feeds the populace. In the next section Bowie adopts a particularly stentorian voice, though to purposeful effect, as he adopts the persona of the machine itself, pleading for dissent, a plague, or war. The machine is so bored that it threatens to kill everyone if some excitement isn't stirred up, though in a beseeching tone that suggests powerlessness rather than power. Bowie was here staking out philosophical territory not often heard in popular song: the possibility that strife and turmoil was preferable to a more placid yet far blander world. You probably wouldn't agree with that if you were a victim of African famine or a terrorist attack, but then it could safely be said that the vast majority of Bowie's audience was probably not prone to such disasters, and had more time on their hands to consider such matters. On a purely musical level "Savior Machine" is quite imaginative and challenging as well, its bleak, steely hard rock dovetailing with some vicious synthesizer trills (by Ralph Mace), and constantly changing tempos back and forth from thudding rock to lurching near- jazz.
