I received a great kindness the other day.

Some months back, my friend Billy commented on one of my posts about David Bowie and we got to talking about his Berlin Trilogy. I mentioned that I had never been able to find a copy of Lodger, the third (and perhaps oddest) in the run and put the conversation out of my mind.

But not Billy.

A few days ago, he showed up at my wife’s shop with a copy for her to give me. That is generous enough, but it went even deeper. As it turns out, many years ago, he had given away his record collection when he came to faith, and when he found out that I was missing this record, he tracked down the friend to whom he had gifted his records so that he could fill the gap in my collection.

That’s a rare gift, and in most cases, the music itself would be overshadowed by that generosity. But Lodger is just as odd and meandering as the tale that brought it to me.

The story is well documented by now—David Bowie, seeking to free himself from the hedonistic drug culture of Los Angeles that had fueled his Thin White Duke period, moved to West Berlin and made weird music with the legendary Brian Eno. The first albums were both released the same year, and are drastically different. Low was foreign and bizarre, filled with all the violence and mania of cocaine withdrawal and culture shock. “Heroes” was more at home in its skin, using experimental textures as an aid to the album’s beating, bleeding heart instead of in spite of it.

After that, Bowie took a break from the studio. He embarked on a world tour that took up most of the year. Meanwhile, Eno started his working relationship with the Talking Heads, starting a partnership with David Byrne that is still ongoing. Both of those events have a marked impact on the sound of Lodger, which walks a tightrope between the familiar and the alien.

At times, it feels practically Vaudevillian, harkening back to the theatricality of his glam rock days in tracks like “Fantastic Voyage,” bisexual anthem “Boys Keep Swinging,” and “DJ,” the latter of which sounds a bit like “Suffragette City.” In other places, they lean hard into world music, most obviously in the dark groove and tumbling cadence of “African Night Flight” and the Istanbul-tinged-Rockabilly of “Yassassin (Turkish for Long Live).” Some moments even forecast the alien genre bending of his swansong Dark Star, such as the warped “Repitition.”

Eno’s contributions to the Berlin Trilogy have never been hidden, but his fingerprints are particularly dark and smudgy here, smearing the disc as if he was handling it with dirty hands. “Move On” is coated in a thick sheen of sonic manipulation like his Here Come the Warm Jets. Closer “Red Money” in particular is driven by a clattering rhythmic energy that feels like Remain In Light came a few years too early.

Disecting Bowie’s career arc is always difficult. He was constantly reaching out in all directions, reinventing himself at the drop of a hat. But as I’m listening to it, Lodger feels like it may be the most singular fulcrum of his career. Of course, this is still the Man Who Fell to Earth trying to sound human, but there are glimpses of each of his faces: the drifting-in-space tranquility of Major Tom, the retro-futuristic rockabilly of Ziggy, the Thin White Duke’s brash Blue-Eyed Soul, and even forecasts of the artsy dancepop he would go on to dominate the 80s with. And yet, each of those facets are warped in a way where they don’t look quite the same. It’s perhaps the most normal sounding of the Berlin Trilogy, but that’s undermined by a sort of Uncanny Valley sense of unease. In other words, classic Bowie.