Pitchfork - Olympia - Wed 27th Oct

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by Joe Tangari

There was a point at which Olympia was intended to be a new Roxy Music album. It would have been the band's first since 1982's Avalon, and there even seems to be a sly nod to that two-decade gap on album opener "You Can Dance", which opens with a brief musical passage that is pretty much a note-for-note reference to Avalon's "True to Life". Somewhere in the process, though, this became another Bryan Ferry solo album, featuring original Roxy Music members Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera, and Brian Eno, and Ferry brought in a raft of collaborators, some old, some new, to round out the record, his first to feature original songs since 2002's Frantic.

The funny thing is, if Roxy Music had released this exact album in 1983 as a follow-up to Avalon, I don't think anyone would have batted an eye. It spills over with the aesthetics and sounds of Ferry's 80s work, which has the strange effect of also making it sound very current. The synths, fluid beats, wiry guitar parts with just a bit of chorus, and electric pianos are all things you can hear on any number of indie rock records today. Ferry puts them together in a very classic rock way, residing at the center as the charismatic front man. The FM-rock approach to the emphasis on vocals is mirrored in the lead guitar contributed by Manzanera and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour-- that kind of playing is one of the few elements of 80s album rock that hasn't made a significant comeback, which may partly be down to the proficiency it requires.

The first half of the album is as solid as anything Ferry has done under his own name. "You Can Dance" and "Alphaville" have their roots in a late-90s session that ultimately produced about half of Frantic, and they're both very centered on grooves. "You Can Dance" grinds along on a creeping bass line and heavy drumming, guitars hovering in the wings as Ferry underplays his signature vocal quaver. "Alphaville" is more slippery, cut through with nicely phrased lead guitar by Gilmour, and it's good pivot to one of the album's standouts, "Heartache By Numbers". The song features the Scissor Sisters as backing band, and their studied grasp of disco and New Wave suits Ferry well-- the echoing piano intro is almost cheeky in its easy anthemic fluency, but it's very much of a piece with the singer's classic songs.

Elsewhere, Ferry indulges in a couple of covers; one is a completely disposable take on Traffic's "No Face, No Name and No Number", but the other is a pretty stunning transformation of Tim Buckley's epochal "Song to the Siren" into a sweeping, synth-soaked pop ballad. Ferry has always been fond of interpreting others' songs on his albums, and like his very best covers in the past, this one reveals a real connection to the song. The album does falter a bit in its second half--"BF Bass" just has a sort of generic fashion-rock sheen, aiming for something high-class and hitting something more like the oddly sterile cover image of Kate Moss, which basically looks like a perfume ad. Still, it's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.


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