Diamond Dogs, David Bowie, 1974

Where do I start with how wonderful this album is? I only knew the singles "Diamond Dogs" and "Rebel Rebel" before this, had never listened to any of the lyrics.  Diamond Dogs is the biggest and best surprise to come out of this project so far for me. Dogs is a great album that belongs in the first rank of Bowie’s work. He deliberately made it dark, difficult, unpleasant, offputting, and insulting to the audience (“this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide!” as a rote crowd cheers).

Chris O' Leary, in his awesome Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame, says that Dogs contains the remnants of three failed Bowie projects:

Diamond Dogs is a salvage job, a compilation of scraps from stillborn Bowie projects. There are remnants of a Ziggy Stardust musical (“Rebel Rebel” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me”), pieces of a barely comprehensible Oliver Twist-by-JG Ballard scenario (“Diamond Dogs,” “Future Legend” and “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family”), and fragments of Bowie’s grandest failed ambition, a musical of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “We Are the Dead,” “Big Brother” and, of course, “1984″ itself.   Link

Knowing this takes nothing away from the album's brilliance.  The pieces go together very well musically and thematically.

I especially like side two ("Rock 'n' Roll with Me," "We Are the Dead," "1984," "Big Brother," and "Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family").  "Chant" is a great song to blast, with its sarcastic chants of “brother” that make me think of Big Brother’s zombies worshipping him.