As I was listening to this album, I started to think about how this is the album where Bowie really became an artist in moving away from traditional song-forms (though that was also true of 'Station to station' to a certain extent). As a famous singer, it was a reasonably daring move to produce largely instrumental music ("Speed of life"), or have his voice feature more as another instrument with equal billing in the mix ("Warszawa").
But of course that would be a fairly arbitrary and debatable notion; really you could just as easily say that Bowie became an artist when he started creating and inhabiting characters for his music to exist through, or when he started creating concept albums, or even when he started making music at all.
I think it would be more accurate to say that this was like when he saw Bolan doing glam and thought "I'll have a bit of that", or when he decided to investigate grunge, or techno/EDM in later years. It was just a case of Bowie listening to krautrock and hearing people like Eno making avant, collage music and thinking "yeah, why not?!"
This album features a couple of favourites of mine, the bouncy "Sound and vision" with its compact harmonised vocals; and the majestic, beautiful 'Warszawa' that, with its chanting vocals and ambient textures, feels like it must have been an influence on my old favourite Mike Patton for some of his more atmospheric work.
A stylistic leap for Bowie and an absolute success (IMO).
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