Bryan Ferry recast Roxy Music faves in a 1920s setting on his last album The Jazz Age, but on the follow-up he returns to the super-smooth lounge pop with which he’s long been associated.
Avonmore is co-produced by Rhett Davies, Ferry’s collaborator since the later Roxy albums, with which this shares an icy sophistication. Johnny Marr, Nile Rodgers, Flea, Ronnie Spector, Mark Knopfler and Maceo Parker all feature, but are subsumed into the lush Ferry soundscape. He’s not going to crumple his tuxedo by changing a winning formula.
Ferry is a past master of covers, and here turns Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns into a phantasmagoria of strings and backwards guitars and whispers Robert Palmer’s Johnny and Mary while Todd Terje provides a pretty Chariots of Fire-ish backdrop. His own compositions show his romantic disconnection and crepuscular charm is undimmed. There’s always a “midnight train going down the track” (Midnight Train), or he’s “lost in the middle of the storm” (Lost).
