Bryan Ferry - Avonmore

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Great stuff from the old smoothie

I am rather surprised to find that I really like this album. I wasn't expecting all that much, but I thought it was good on first hearing and it has grown even better with a lot of listens since. Ferry is still great singer and this is a star-studded album, with a well-publicised array of terrific guest musicians and singers and a fine producer (along with Ferry himself) in Rhett Davies. The result is a bit of class, I think.

The style and feel remind me rather of the Roxy Music albums Flesh And Blood and Avalon. 35 years on, the sound is richer and the production more modern, but there are still the beautiful vocals from Ferry and great harmonies, a fine selection of singable songs, enough harmonic originality to keep you interested, a compellingly danceable beat even in the slower numbers, and that familiar, distinctive air of yearning, melancholy and occasional real beauty pervades the whole album.

The material is very good. The eight songs written by Ferry are well up to standard musically, and they are lyrically pretty good, too. There are weaknesses: starting a song with the line "Midnight train rolling down the track" is bordering on criminally lazy, even though it's a good song musically, and I'll bet you can guess what the rhyme is, too. However, most of it is much better than that; Driving Me Wild, for example, contains lines like
"I'm dealing with a feeling
That nobody knows
With the kindness of ravens,
The murder of crows"
which I find very arresting even if it might well be pretty meaningless.

The album closes with two covers, both of which I was dreading for different reasons: Sondheim's Send In The Clowns just because it's Send In The <expletive deleted> Clowns again, and Robert Palmer's Johnny And Mary because I think it is one of the very greatest songs of the 80s and I didn't want to see it messed with. In fact, both are excellent. Ferry takes a few more liberties with the melodies than I'd like, but overall they are fine, sincere and meaningful new takes on both songs - exactly what makes a good cover version, I think.

Sorry to go on, but I was genuinely expecting this just to be OK at best. In fact, I think it's really good and I thought it was worth trying to explain why. In a nutshell, it's good material, excellently performed, arranged and produced. If in doubt, I'd suggest you listen to a few samples. If you like the sound of them, don't hesitate - this is a fine album which I recommend very warmly.