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.