An old story: an art professor split his class in two, and assigned each a task. The first group was to make a piece of pottery each day until the end of the year. The second group was to spend the entire year making a single perfect pot. At the end of the year he compared their work: the first group’s daily pot looked much better.

Bowie became distant from public life after his heart attack in 2004. He never formally announced his retirement, but sometimes people don’t. In 2013, with no warning or notice, he released an album: his first in 10 years. All of the eleven classic Bowie albums (TMWSTW to Scary Monsters) came out in a similar block of time.

It was called The Next Day, and it had an aura of artistic disrespect, from the “vandalised” cover to the lack of pre-release publicity. This approach was becoming trendy in 2013 (just a year ago, Death Grips released an album with the drummer’s penis on the cover). Albums like Ziggy Stardust sometimes seem to creak under the weight of their own heraldry: clearly Bowie’s approach was to release music free from all that. A few years later and TND would have been dropped straight to Soundcloud, along with a fire emoji.

But it’s casual release barely disguises an album that’s fraught with labour. This statue bears its chisel marks: these songs were written and produced over long periods of time, and sometimes sweat with indecision and self-doubt. The Next Day is never more compelling than in the moments when you realise that Bowie must have come close to scrapping the entire thing.

It’s produced by Visconti, and features an impressive lineup of Bowie Band Members from Christmases Past. Gail Ann Dorsey, Sterling Campbell, saxophonist Steve Elson, Gerry Leonard, and David Torn. Perhaps most plangent is the presence of Earl Slick, who provides a crushing single-coil riff on “(You Will) Set the World On Fire” as well as a link back to the glory days of Station to Station. I really enjoy Slick. He might not be as technically capable as Mick Ronson, or as colourful as Carlos Alomar, but he outlasted both of them.

The Next Day it offers music drawn from one of two wells. The first is heavy rock, the second is vaguely U2-ish light rock with ambient and jazz influences. The title track is the most bombastic and magniloquent of the rockers, containing abrasive riffs and lines like “they know God exists for the Devil told them so”. It’s followed by “Dirty Boys”, which is slower but equally savage, its disembowelling stabs of brass pierce the listener like rusty switchblades.

On “The Stars are Out Tonight”, Bowie offers his most coherent thoughts yet on artifice and illusion. The public’s obsession with celebrities seems vapid and awful, but not having celebrities at all might be even worse. His vocals sound querulous and thin, but powerful when they need to be. This is classic Bowie: he sounds weak, but then casts weakness aside like an ill-fitting cloak.

Other tracks are musically indistinct and lyrically indecipherable. On “I’d Rather Be High”, “How Does the Grass Grow”, and “(You Will) Set the World On Fire” he mixes apocalyptic fervour with introspection and perhaps autobiography. Ever since “The Bewlay Brothers”, Bowie’s listeners have known not to take him too seriously (or too lightly), and TND contains reams of lyrics in that vein.

I don’t think it’s a great album. Despite its lengthy gestation it sounds like it could have come out in 2003: as with Reality most of the songs go in one ear and out the other. There’s no spark. “Valentine’s Day” is just mush, “I’d Rather Be High”, “Where Are We Now?” is a ballad so weak it sounds like it could be extinguished by the draft of a shut door, and “If You Can See Me” is a triage squad of musicians furiously overplaying to compensate for the deadness of the music.

It’s over fifty minutes long, and has forty minutes of hooks. The material soon overstays the listener’s patience: even the furious title track just sounds toneless and dumb after a while, like we’re listening to Tin Machine again. TND has many great moments, and even a few great songs, but as a whole it’s exhausting and overlong. It’s like what they said about Wagner: sixty great minutes and a poor hour.

Can it be called a return to form? What form? Bowie has many. There’s vague echoes of the a better past, but also lots of modernistic touches. This is a latter day Bowie album, with influences from some of the worst parts of his catalog. If it’s interesting, it’s for the truly terrified moments, with Bowie just not sure of what comes next. He is a man not prepared for the future, but nevertheless having it bear down on top of him.

For over eleven years, Reality wore a title it was never meant to bear: that of Last David Bowie Album.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Bowie had every intention of continuing recording and touring. But in 2004 (near the end of the grueling 112-date Reality World Tour) he collapsed on stage in Germany, evidently from a heart attack. The beautiful statue that had worn countless layers of paint had suffered an interior crack.

There were no more tours, no more albums. For over ten years, Reality was the end. It never felt like one: it was a small, transitory album, trivial at times, and lacked an identity. It wasn’t a grand, towering tombstone, with HERE LIES DAVID BOWIE etched in stone.

Maybe its battlefield promotion helped it, giving threadbare songs like “She’ll Drive the Big Car” and “Looking for Water” more attention than they deserved. But after The Next Day came out in 2013, Reality fell into its correct place. It’s in the lower half of Bowie’s albums, which is no demerit. It’s also in the lower half of Bowie’s post-70s work, which probably is.

It has good songs, as they all do. “Pablo Picasso” takes the Modern Lovers’ one-chord pony on new and surprising adventures. “The Loneliest Guy” is very unsettling, like a taut and humming spiderweb of Mike Garson’s reverb-soaked piano and Gerry Leonard’s vibrato-drenched guitar. Bowie seems to be drawing from Scott Walker’s approach to songwriting here, turning the soundscape into a huge blank space that crashes sea-shell-like with the sound of its own emptiness.

“Fall Dog Bombs the Moon” is like the last Tin Machine song, very dry and underproduced. The lyrics are both cryptic and heavy-handed, clearly exculpatory of George Bush while not really naming him. I sort of like it.

“Try Some, Buy Some” was originally produced by Phil Spector, and sounds like Regina Spektor. I’ve only listened to it once or twice – a little of this stuff goes a long way.

“Reality” is noisy and quickly becomes unwelcome: it’s like a jam session that nobody has the courage to end. But closing track “Bring Me the Disco King” is another album highlight. It’s another powerful minimalistic song, consisting of Bowie’s voice, Garson’s jazz-influenced piano playing, and Matt Chamberlain’s drum loops. The result is enchanting: it has some of the same magic that “Lady Grinning Soul” had, all those years ago. But then Garson starts vamping all sorts of neo-tonal stuff over the outro (as if trying to recapture “Aladdin Sane”), and a lot of the magic leaves.

And then Reality ends. It was supposed to be yet another stone in a road with no clear end or destination: the road of life. The trouble with such a road is that it can just stop at any moment, without warning, and you have to accept that the final moment has come. For a while, Bowie fans had to accept that this album was his Abbey Road. But eleven years later, a new stone appeared.

In 2002, Bowie submitted this application for the tiny pool of Rock and Roll Comeback stories.

The grunge and noise rock inclinations of the Reeves Gabrels era are scaled back. The music that came before was like an overgrown forest, while Heathen has strip-cut and burned out areas of emptiness. If nothing else, the album has space.

It labours mightily to recapture the magic of 70s Bowie. The lead single “Slow Burn” is reheated “Heroes”, a song that captures distance and time with reverb-soaked guitars and a vaguely motorik-inspired drum performance (and a Pete Townsend guitar solo, too). The Pixies cover “Cactus” strangely echoes the jangly, raw Mick Ronson era.

And there’s one song that blends past and present bewilderingly: a cover of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s novelty song “I Took A Trip on a Gemini Spaceship” (Bowie, in a decision that will never be explained, changed the title to “-Craft”.)

The “Ledge”, incidentally is an odd character from Lubbock, Texas, briefly famous in the 60s (he inspired Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” name) and then forgotten. Bowie had heard that he was complaining of never making any money from Ziggy Stardust, and figured out a way to make him whole!

“Everyone Says Hi” and “A Better Future” are charming and innocent, but thin starvelings of songs. “5.15 The Angels Have Gone” is heftier, and has better hooks. The title track “Heathen” is wonderful, containing lumbering guitars, and lonely saxophone lines (which evokes “Heroes” once again).

I like a lot of Heathen, but I prefer the baroque side to the efforts at writing hits on the first half of the album. I’m also surprised by how good the covers are. Normally, covers are the weaknesses of Bowie’s albums, not the strong parts.