Rethinking Avalon

This article at Stylus is an interesting take on Roxy Music's Avalon and provides some good perspective and few historical tidbits that I wasn't aware of. They write:

Give Ferry this: Avalon is his masterstroke as a vocalist. The absence of Mackay and Manzanera pulled the herky-jerky out of Roxy’s sound, leaving even, considered crevasses for Ferry’s yolky tenor. “More Than This” is a true beaut’, and the patience he exhibits throughout “To Turn You On” is a marvel. The tremoloed oscillations of “True to Life” are as cozy a shelter for Ferry’s lilt as he’d yet seen; this slow waving is a better fit for him than “Virginia Plain” or “Ladytron." Somewhere between there and “The Main Thing” he sired Morrisey, Mark Hollis, and Antony Hegarty.

But overall they seem to fault Ferry for a) being a sleezy playboy crooner, and b) not being Brian Eno, which isn't really fair on either count. They also place far too much emphasis on the genre tics and the instrumentation, while overlooking the masterful way everything is constructed into a coherent whole. The album works as an album, and adds up to a whole lot more than a collection of songs and hit singles. It achieves a mood completely its own, at once romantic, graceful, and bittersweet. It's the sound of a band and a performer that has knowingly reached its logical conclusion and decided to make one last masterpiece. I guess I'll always be a fan of this one.

Stylus on Fleetwood Mac

Patrick McKay does a nice job of summing up and contextualizing Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. It's one of those rare albums that was both hugely popular and actually very good. McKay writes:

While the Clash and the Sex Pistols renewed rock with a shot of youthful danger, Rumours allowed for the possibility that rock could age gracefully, and take on subjects of an emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager. This may have begat adult contemporary, VH1, and Phil Collins, but at least with Rumours, Fleetwood Mac wasn’t trying to soften rock, but to blunt its edge, to create something more expansive in effect and broader in appeal. The consequence was a career spent in the shadow of that peak; the reward was a receptive audience—of 19 million and counting.

I think this is a continuing issue in contemporary music. On the one hand pop music is driven by watered down corporate concerns (with ever diminishing artistic and financial returns). On the other, indie rock is too often motivated by resentment and artistic overreaching; always in pursuit of the new at the expense of skill, craft, and experience. What gets left out or pushed aside in the mom-rock and dad-rock name-calling of today (as Gen-Xers hasten through their 30s and into their 40s), is this desire for subjects in rock music that have that "emotional complexity unavailable to a teenager." This is the idea that music can have a purpose and be about something deeper than the latest sense of moral outrage or cause-based charity hullabaloo. That it could actually allow you to express something true about life, and how it is lived, and how people grow and change over time. In the end, music is a refuge for our most emotional, irrational selves, and it is this ability to sing your life that connects those 19 million and why we need more music like Rumours.