REVIEW: ROXY MUSIC – Avalon (EG)
By 1982 Roxy Music were a somewhat spent force in the live arena. Just go to YouTube and type in Roxy Music 1982 to see what I mean. The previous album Flesh + Blood only just kept the flame burning. Even the massive single success the band had with Lennon’s Jealous Guy between the release dates of the two records did little to provide the faithful fan base with a hope that the next long player Ferry and co released would be an exciting one, let alone an album as ground breaking as it is.
Ground breaking? I tell you no lie. The songs themselves are pretty strong, the singles More Than This and Avalon are great slices of popular music sure but it’s the production here that still today turns this from being a period piece into a master class in smooth. Engineer Rhett Davis managed to capture the aura of the 80′s perfectly, it sounds like it cost a fortune. The layered vocals on The Space Between are ridiculously lush, the keys gently phase in and out under the horns never invading the space enough to cut through. People will argue that everything described above sounds like the band was playing it safe but I would counter that for a band as inventive and shocking as Roxy once were to come out with such a clean and silky sounding record would have been far from the safe move. The risk of alienating what was left of the bands audience didn’t out way the group’s vision for Avalon. Luckily by mastering this new direction a whole new generation discovered the band. All be it a more mainstream and adult orientated one.
The only time that the flow is interrupted is towards the end of the album with the track To Turn You On. The lyrics sound desperate with Ferry crooning that he’d “do anything to turn you on” and the bass begins to interrupt the space of the otherwise solid melody.
Only a couple of years later the likes of Dire Straits and the god awful Chris De Burgh adopted the sound and launched a thousand dad dances at a thousand awful weddings but no one has captured the utter smoothness quite so well as the ultra-laid back production here.
After the band completed the tour in support of the album during 1983 Roxy Music split for good, no longer a force to be reckoned with the group that survived punk was eventually killed out by the likes of Wham and Duran Duran. Not long after this Brian Ferry’s solo career reaped huge rewards with his Boys and Girls LP in ’85 which to the casual fan like myself couldn’t touch anywhere near the class that his previous outfit delivered, in comparison to Avalon it felt over produces and the songwriting rushed.
As for the current reunion? With no Eno, I just don’t see the point. I can’t imagine anything more stifled than sitting through performances like those YouTube clips from the bands final tour before they originally split. Add on top 25 years of age to each member and it spells out a recipe for snooze time.
