Reviewed by Stephen Lam
Released: May 28 1982 Roxy Music Avalon Genre: The Only Worthy Soundtrack To An Antony Price Commercial In 1982 Allen’s Rating: 5 out of 5 Stephen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5 Highlights: Avalon While My Heart Is Still Beating The Main Thing To Turn You On True To Life Allen's Additional Highlights: More Than This The entire studio output of Roxy Music - grannies of EuroTrash Art Rock - can be seen as one gradual shedding of the flashy, brash Art School/Electric Vaudeville innovation/weirdness of their 1972 debut. “Avalon” sat on the other side of the band’s artistic tangent - it’s the unabashedly stylish soundtrack for the late 70s in-crowd. Style over Substance. Vibe over Facts. This ain’t no disco, no “three chords and a truth”, no 25-minute song-cycles, and certainly no confessional singer-songwriter acid flashback. It’s not even “Country Life” or “Siren”. Roxy Music was a different band on “Avalon” than on anything before “Manifesto”. In fact, anticipating the backlash from old-school Roxy fans as I write this, I propose that one of the keys to enjoying “Avalon” is not to think of it as the same band you knew. Without the comparisons, “Avalon” was a fine record. It’s its own thing, its own focus, and its own excellence. By the time Roxy made this record, Bryan Ferry had assumed full control of the music. He’d been working with producer Rhett Davies since “Flesh+Blood” to finesse this new sound - sophisticated, atmospheric, multi-layered, danceable post-modern romantic songs sung by a honey-voiced but fragile British tenor crooner. That’s the sound of “Avalon”. No more atonality, prickly stiletto tartiness, 3-penny melodrama, cutting-edge melodies, and generally confrontational elements. “Avalon” swayed, floated, and pulsated in its own unhurried groove. It’s minimalist at heart. It’s purposeful at sounding exactly the way it did - this was not, in my opinion, “Roxy Music going soft”. It was exactly what they were aiming for - a different sound, a different trip. Something simpler, more spacious, more modern-sounding, more dance-y, yet more dream-like, with moodier cinematic. Ferry’s trembling tenor, once dangerous and feisty, now hummed with restraint, and trembled with fragility. It made “It’s been fun for a while, there was no way of knowing” sounded less like the condescending fuck he was than someone who’s telling you the plain truth. Songs like “While My Heart Is Still Beating” and “Take A Chance With Me” wouldn’t work as well if the singing voice wasn’t shot in self-doubt. Two songs on the album illustrated Roxy’s “state of the art”: “Avalon” (the song): this was the first time Ferry/Davies came upon the following approach: start with a medium-slow reggae-ish groove of simple drums and lots of percussion, then add a ton of tiny overdubs: synthesizers, guitars (I counted 6 guitar parts in “Avalon”), Andy MacKay’s saxes, Ferry’s CP70, harmony vocals, etc. However, none of these parts sustained or stayed on for long. A chord here, a note there, a swell here, a line there, forming a web of sounds coming in and going out of focus. The result, brilliantly executed in the title track - a slow-grind reggae supporting an instrumentation that “shimmered” at you - had since been blueprinted: listen to Ferry’s “Slave To Love”, “Windswept”, “Your Painted Smile”, “You Can Dance”, etc. It became a signature Bryan Ferry sound throughout his solo career. In “Avalon”, Ferry dropped his voice an octave and got close to the mic for his tired, intimate, and suggestive delivery. Lyrically, I’m still trying to figure out how the verses relate to the legend of Avalon. It hardly mattered, especially with classic Ferry lines like “When you bossanova, there’s no holding. Would you have me dancing, out of nowhere.” Naughty but classy. Yanick Étienne’s (nicked from a Haitian band recording next door, says Wiki) beautiful vocals at the end was the big Play Out, the screaming guitar solo of the song that was, thankfully, not done on a guitar. Not a song designed to work in skeletal form (a by-the-campfire version done on a beater acoustic would have simply sounded stupid), “Avalon” was the sum of its sonics, approaches, and atmospherics. “The Main Thing” was state-of-the-art Roxy dance music. It took nearly a full minute for the groove to unfold, showing, in real time, how it’s constructed. The wah-wah bass, which pulsated and “pumped” the groove enough to be a signature part, made its appearance for the first (but certainly not the last) time in Ferry-lore. The aforementioned shimmering web of instrumentation continued to be at play: a myriad of small parts weaved in and out, alternately active and thinned-out, animating the otherwise very straightforward drums and vocals. The fact that there was no chord change - the entire song camped solid on an F minor - made the song feel less of a “dance version” of a song than a tune deliberately constructed as a dance number. It wasn’t a straight made-for-dance-only, proto-underground-club thing, either. “The Main Thing” was just the soundtrack to that particular scene in the imaginary movie of “Avalon”, in which the protagonist resolved to hit the dance floor, the lyrics being what you’d tell your partner while you danced. Certain things were just better said while you danced. I am not a fan of “More Than This”. The song could have easily been on “Flesh+Blood”, and the pretty melody could not hide the awkwardness of the “hey, it’s just sex, baby” sentiment. I would’ve been happy with “The Space Between” as the album opener. “While My Heart Is Still Beating” shared the same musical DNA as “Avalon” (the song), but its sentiment sprung more from the sighing, “tragic but beautiful” classic Bryan Ferry. Lyrically, “Take A Chance With Me” and “To Turn You On” tied the band back to its earlier stylings: with word-plays like “I was blind, can’t you see?”, “I could walk you through the park if you’re feeling blue, or whatever”, and “Must phone me, you know me” Ferry was pulling a bit of the old Art/Vaudeville Brat. “To Turn You On” even had a little of Ferry’s “sing/talk” vocals - his signature style on early Roxy records. The album’s proper closer, “True To Life”, was a slight departure from the rest of the album, in that it was sober, reflective and “content”. The arrangement hung over Ferry’s mesmerizing Prophet 5 pulse (recycled on “You Can Dance” almost 30 years later), and contained some of Phil Manzanera’s and Neil Hubbard’s (Hubbard was the absolute unsung hero on the album) finest playing. This end-of-album resolution was also on their previous record - the emotional arc on the 2nd half of “Flesh+Blood” that built to the resolution in “Running Wild”. However, “Running Wild” and “True To Life” resolved in very different ways, with the former ending on the bitter (reminded me of what Milan Kundera referred to as “Litost”) line “I could even pretend that I’ll fall in love again”, and the latter ending with the hopeful “But arm and arm with my seaside diamond, I’ll soon be home”. “Running Wild” was more of a resignation than “True To Life”’s genuine resolution. “Avalon” sounded smooth, but it was complex and methodical, and was hardly muzak. The sonics - the webs of shimmering instrumentations, the economy and restraint of “underplaying” each instrument, the care to put each sound in its own place - was an integral part of what the album was about, which altogether showcased how deft and masterful the band had become, and how successful the Ferry/Davies pairing was (the two would go on to make many of Ferry’s solo albums). There was a lot going on, but nothing was out of place, nothing sounded congested, and each song floated to the next as if the album was through-composed. It’s a record that’s great to listen to in its entirety. It was also the most airy and spacious-sounding Roxy record, light years away from the dense bombardment of “Do The Strand”, etc. Many have named “Avalon” one of their “make out” records. I prefer to think of it as the “dancing and wooing before making out” record. “Avalon” was not about sex, per se, but suggestions of possibilities. Suggestions that were alluring, stylish, shimmering, groovy, and - if you fall for them - irresistible. And as much as it was a finale for Roxy, “Avalon” also became the blueprint of Ferry’s solo records. Take the album’s formulae, replace the drummer with punchier drum machines/samples, add an army of top-shelf players like Hubbard, Marcus Miller, David Gilmour, Mark Knopfler, etc., and you have “Boys and Girls”, “Bête Noire”, and so on. p.s. Yes, Bryan Ferry was the rightful heir to the Antony Price suit - not Duran Duran, who’d managed to fuck the whole thing up by rolling up the sleeves. You don’t fucking roll up Anthony Price jacket sleeves. You just don’t.
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