Roxy Music – Avalon - when the party's over.

In popular culture, artists cross the fine line between artistic integrity and pandering to the masses at their own peril.  Listeners often make this distinction between these two states of being with the artist discovering where they landed after the fact.  With this in mind, what Roxy Music achieved with their final studio album fairly boggles the mind.  When critics called it art-rock, they were really on to something.

Roxy Music formed in 1971 around two future musical giants:  Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno led an edgy, glam-rock and highly experimental outfit.  Eno left the group after two albums and sound on future albums became smoother but no less complex.  The glam touches became less edgy and the songs more romantic, the energy mellowing somewhat over the course of the band's recording career.

In hindsight, Eno and Ferry both seem to have matured during the seventies and eighties both creating intricate soundscapes that ebbed and flowed, the songs bubbling out of a soothing, organic sound then fading again.  Eno took this to one extreme with his ambient musical experiments, but Ferry created a similar sensation within a more popular musical context.

 

Ferry recorded both rock and jazz standards solo and with orchestral ensembles.  His suave vocals and sharp attention to detail both sonically and lyrically define his best work.  His best music has a timeless quality, and it’s hard to imagine him not dressed in evening attire and without one of the beautiful models who graced the band’s album covers at his side.

The logical conclusion of Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music’s sonic evolution, Avalon sounds like a single song.  The tempos and the orchestration run together with the lyrical themes exploring intimate relationships in dreamy waves.  The whole oozes romance, a gauzy palette with elegant touches throughout.  After the music fades out, one is left with the haunted, almost drunken sensation like the end of the night after attending an exceptional cocktail party.  The perfect nightcap to the glitzy, glamorous arc of his band.  

Josh Ritter - The Animal Years - you may not know him, but you should.

I find it borderline criminal that Josh Ritter is not a household name.  A critic’s darling, often considered one of the finest living songwriters, he flies under the radar of the general public.  He has released seven studio albums and several live ones but this gem should have become a massive hit.  Alas, no.

His lyrics have a timeless, articulate quality without the pretentiousness that so often creeps into the work of the less accomplished.  Ritter most often draws comparison to Dylan and Springsteen and I’ll buy into that.  Like those giants, he is able to throw of casual poetry that becomes more elegant upon close inspection, like a rose opening to reveal its beauty.   Like Dylan, he searches for new sounds and perspective on each successive album.   Like Springsteen his work often describes an everyman but under wide open rural skies rather than on Jersey’s mean streets.  And like the Boss, his Royal City Band provides the perfect platform for his songs.

Born in Idaho, but educated at Oberlin College in Ohio.  He traveled northeast and began his professional music career.   He tells stories with a literate quality.  I often feel they are set in the vague past, like a Hemingway novel or a Faulkner story. 

The Animal Years collects some of his finest songs, creating little self contained worlds populated by real characters.

Lillian, Egypt is the story of unrequited love between a silent movie star and an everyman cast as the villain' driven by Scott Kassier’s piano.  The tracks seem to breathe like the breeze on a warm day, the intensity surging on Wolves, hushed on In The Dark and reaching a cacophonous boil on Thin Blue Flame.  Good Man and Monster Ballads flow with a casual grace that belies the underlying craft of their composition.

In interviews and in concert, he bubbles over with a thankful joy, as if humility won’t let him accept that his success thus far could be due to anything but luck.  He has set course creating an exceptional body of timeless work, crafting one exceptional album after the other.  

The Animal Years is as good a point as any to enter Josh Ritter’s stream, to float along through history, love and loss and always hope.  Personally, I hope more listeners will have the chance to experience his music.