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.