in 1977, Bowie proclaimed that the album was "devoid of spirit ... Even the love songs are detached, but I think it's fascinating." Musical style Station to Station is often cited as a transitional album in Bowie's career. Developing the funk, disco and soul sound of Young Americans, the album also reflects the influences of electronic and the German music genre of krautrock, particularly by bands such as Neu! and Kraftwerk. Bowie had exhibited avant-garde elements on the 1973 tracks "Aladdin Sane (1913–1938–197?)" and "Time". According to Robert Christgau, Bowie's experimentation with African-American music styles had matured by the time he recorded Station to Station, as the record appropriated them "in a decidedly spacy and abrasive context"; he said it added soul to the "mechanical, fragmented, rather secondhand elegance" explored on Aladdin Sane (1973). Initial reviews of Station to Station considered it a "dance" album. As a whole, reviewers have classified Station to Stations music as "glacial, synthesized funk-rock", "avant-garde art-rock", space rock, "a hybrid of electronic R&B", "eerie avant-pop", "art-funk", and "ice-funk". AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes it includes "everything from epic ballads and disco to synthesized avant pop" while extending "the detached plastic soul of Young Americans to an elegant, robotic extreme". Chris Randle of The Village Voice labeled the album "robotic R&B". Maslin told Circus magazine: "There was no specific sound in mind. I don't think [Bowie] had any specific direction as far as whether it should be R&B, or more English-sounding, or more commercial or less commercial. I think he went out more to make a record this time than to worry about what it was going to turn out to be." Bowie remarked in 1999 that the music on the album has a "certain charismatic quality to it ... that really eats into you". The ten-minute title track has been described as heralding "a new era of experimentalism" for Bowie. The song is split into two parts: a slow, hypnotic march, introduced by a noise resembling a train—created by Slick on guitar using flangers and delay effects—before it abruptly changes to a what Alan Light of Rolling Stone calls a "celebratory groove", which lasts for the rest of the track. Pitchfork and Rolling Stone defined the track as a "momentous prog-disco suite" and a "Krautrock disco opus" respectively. With its krautrock influence, it is the album's clearest foretaste of Bowie's subsequent Berlin Trilogy. The musical