Bowie's music offers an experience that is as intriguing as it is chilling, but only to the listener sufficiently together to withstand its schizophrenia.

Bowie deals throughout [The Man Who Sold The World] in oblique and fragmented images that are almost impenetrable separately but which convey with effectiveness an ironic and bitter sense of the world when considered together. His unhappy relationship with the world is traced to his inability to perceive it sanely….

In an album that, save for the impotently sarcastic "Running Gun Blues," is uniformly excellent, at least four tracks demand special attention: "Savior Machine" demonstrates that Bowie far from exhausted his talent for quietly moralistic rock sci-fi in his earlier "Space Oddity." The almost insufferably depressive "After All" contains the strangest refrain perhaps ever conceived—a haunting, mantric "Oh, by jingo." "The Width of the Circle" is both a hallucination with religious overtones that...