Station to Station is an odd album–at once accessible and dense, soulful and mechanical, soul driven, yet dripping with influence from Krautrock, or German electronic music.
Bowie retains his over-the-top plastic soul voice with its heavy tremolo and emotive crescendos, but there’s an alien quality to it–a holdover from his involvement in the film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
But the music especially is indefinably different from Young Americans. Even where it revels in soul and funk like its predecessor (like “The Golden Years” and “TVC15”), it’s more mechanical and detached.
If Young Americans sounds like a white man singing black music, Station to Station sounds like a white alien doing his best to sing human music.