Station to Station EMI *****

It begins with a locomotive chug, the clatter lurching from side to side until the musicians gradually lock in together before, at just past the three-minute mark, a spectral voice intones: “the return of the Thin White Duke, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes.”

David Bowie’s 10th album, originally released in 1976, receives the reissue treatment – if you have the cash, you can plump for the Super Deluxe Limited Edition version, which comes with a remastered album, a disc of radio edits, a DVD, posters, booklets, vinyl and other assorted paraphernalia. If you’re not a Bowie completist, then perhaps you should just stick to the album itself, which, when push comes to shove, is Bowie’s neurotic masterpiece.

Station to Stationis a record fused in the heat of Hollywood (Bowie was filming Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth) and the air-conditioned chill of his LA mansion, where he would stay awake for days, curtains drawn 24/7, living on a diet of vegetables, ciggies, cocaine and milk. Made between the Philly sound funk of Young Americans(1975) and the European avant-pop of Low(1977), Station to Stationmight justifiably be termed a transition album (the chorus of TVC15starts with that very word). But to these ears it fits and sits perfectly between Bowie as constantly reinvented rock star and Bowie as deliberately unsettled creative genius.

Everything here is wired together, in sync and in tune with the before and after. In some ways, however, it's Bowie's least musically cohesive 1970s album. A ballad ( Word on a Wing), rock'n'roll ( TVC15), funk ( Golden Years), krautrock ( Station to Station), guitar solo heaven ( Stay) and a cover ( Wild Is the Wind) push and pull in a number of directions. Meanwhile, the nerve-jangling moods of collapse (drug addiction), detachment (a marriage in ruins), disengagement (his management in tatters) and paranoia (his obsession with the occult took a turn for the worse) are filtered throughout.

For an album that Bowie claims to hardly recall making ("I know it was recorded in LA because I read it was," he has said), Station to Stationhas endured through the decades because the songs are delivered in a voice that elegantly and spookily mirrors their primary, unstable concerns.

Next up for Bowie was the Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroesand Lodger. Was there no end to this man's creativity in the 1970s? See davidbowie.com

Download tracks: Station to Station, TVC15