DAVID BOWIE returns triumphantly to earth with his latest record. He had been off exploring the possibilities of avant-garde electronic rock, an amazing journey guided by British synthesizer genius Brian Eno, for two albums. Those albums, Low and Heroes, were fascinating but uneven. Bowie seemed to be exposing an extravagant side of his musical language, one that wallowed in nine-minute moans and tones. He also turned out some excellent songs, especially the first side of Low and the title track of Heroes.

But Bowie has always made his best music when he assumes a persona--that's become one of the cliches of rock journalism, but it's true. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars defined a hard-hitting, loud, fast rock sound four years before the Ramones hit the road. To make that album in 1972, Bowie set himself up as the glittery, self-destructive androgyne Ziggy. More masks followed, dizzingly, along with more fine albums--Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, and a popular if antiseptic excursion into Philadelphia funk, Young Americans. Then it was off into the beckoning electronic void.

Lodger is striking not just because Bowie assumes many characters on it, but because he draws on the different musical styles of his past to find the right sound for each. The album has straight rock and roll, some R&B-influenced pop, some ballads and anthems, and a lot of the electronically treated avant-garde rock a la Low. Eno's role in the preparation of Lodgeris considerably narrower than on the previous albums; Bowie apparently called the shots here, with Eno simply finding the perfect sound to match Bowie's ideas.

What Bowie has learned from his extended association with Eno is how to manipulate the texture of each song. In the first song on Lodger, a saccharine ballad decrying the possibility of nuclear war called "Fantastic Voyage," the sound is gloppy and sweet--Eno is responsible for providing "ambient drone," the record jacket tells us. For the next track, a weird patter-song called "African Night Flight," his contribution is "prepared cricket menace." Elsewhere on the album he offers work on the Eroica horn or the horse trumpet.

Whatever combination of electronics. tape, and his own inspiration Eno uses. the sounds he concocts never stray from the musical demands of Bowie's songs, and the sheer multitude and variety of these sounds makes Lodger a fascinating album almost as fascinating efforts. Lodger can claim its own identity because of Bowie's flair for personification--he takes each of Eno's abstract noises and weds it to whichever character he's playing at the moment.

In "African Night Flight," Lodger's most interesting song, Bowie becomes a British pilot pushing his luck somewhere in Central Africa. Bowie spits out syllables like gunfire, Eno's crickets' chatter, the band thumps out a halting beat, and Eno chants Swahili in the background. If you heard it on your car radio, you'd probably switch the station, and if you heard it on a transistor radio you'd think you were between stations--but on a good stereo, maybe with headphones, you just might be up there over Mombassa, running guns or running out of fuel.

A number of songs on Lodger take the album title's cue and present tales of travel. "Move On" is Bowie's paean to the vagrant life, his infinitely more urbane version of the Who's "Going Mobile." He uses his dramatic, declamatory singing style to good effect here as in "Heroes," reminding us that he's got one of the great pop voices of our day. "Red Sails" has obscure lyrics--witness

The hinterland, the hinterland

We're gonna sail to the hinterland

And it's far far far far far far far far away

It's far far far far faa faa da-da-da-da-da-

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3-4

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But the urgent, emphatic, agitated music Bowie and Eno provide elevates them and makes them memorable. "Look Back in Anger" shares the dramatic singing and anxious music, tosses in lyrics about the angel of death and Beatles-like backing vocals, and tops it off with Eno's virtuoso performance on several obscure instruments to become the album's best song.

But these are probably not the songs you'll hear first; radio stations have chosen "D.J." and "Boys Keep Swinging" for airplay. "D.J." is the most commercial and least interesting song on Lodger--Bowie's vocal acrobatics are impressive, but the music is in the same style as, and not much of an advance on, that of Young Americans. "Boys Keep Swinging" sets the throbbing electronic pulse of "Heroes" to lyrics that sound like Bowie's answer to the Village People. He's always skirted the epicene, of course, and this is just a bit of harmless camp, but it seems out of place next to the wanderlust and cosmopolitan vigor of the rest of the album.

IN A RECENT edition of the New York Times Book Review, a critic arguing for the persistence of decadence in modern society chose David Bowie as one of his prime examples. That seems both gratuitous and unfair, as though Bowie's sheen of bisexuality and world-weariness alone could spell the decay of an entire civilization. And whatever objections you may have to Bowie's recent music, no one could call it worn-out or impotent.

So far, Bowie and Eno are the only artists to use electronics in an imaginative, fertile way for music we can still call rock. Performers like Keith Emerson and Peter Gabriel know only how to shock and dazzle their audiences by using the synthesizer like a super-organ; disco and mainstream musicians have used electronics only to make the sounds of real instruments louder, more regular, or weirder.

Only Eno has used the capabilities of the synthesizer to create entirely new sounds, noises which make it a unique instrument, not an imitator. Bowie succeeds on Lodger by harnessing Eno's abstruse, intellectual sounds and molding them into songs with human interest for a mass audience. That's not decadent; it's visionary.