Album Review: Bryan Ferry's Olympia

That spacious, luxurious atmosphere Bryan Ferry discovered for Avalon, the final Roxy Music album in 1982, has been deepened and refined beyond expectation on Ferry’s new solo CD, Olympia. It’s not a Roxy Music project, even though veteran members guitarist Phil Manzanera, horn-player Andy McKay, drummer Paul Thompson and synthplayer Brian Eno appear on different tracks, because there’s no band identity exploring new musical terrain with signature rock 'n' roll-based velocity and force. Having created the seduction soundtrack for the past quarter-century, Ferry focuses on his personal idealism in Olympia, launching from the lush Roxy Music platform.

Ferry’s romantic world view is articulated through a musical richness that recalls his art-rock past, his R&B ethic and his increasingly more profound sense of mortality. (It’s in his voice, a mature whisper, delicate and more persuasive than ever.) The only cultural equivalent to Olympia’s voluptuous depth is Godard’s late, metaphysical film features where his observation of modern politics, society and art prove the mysteries of the cosmos.

Olympia puts a listener inside a great lover’s head—Ferry as R&B Casanova contemplates life  and his own cultural inspirations—whether Edouard Manet’s 1888 courtesan painting (which gives the album its title) or two classic rock song re-interpretations, a one-two punch cushioned between impressive original tunes. Ferry’s cover of Traffic’s “No  Name, No Face, No Number” attests his long-time adoration of a feminine ideal in melody and words poignant enough to call his own. But on “Song to the Siren” Ferry literally remakes Tim Buckley’s grandiose elegy (favored by pop dilettantes like the morose 80s post-punk group This Mortal Coil) so that it redefines his own frequent evocations of destiny and transcendence. Ferry’s an Old World romantic with a modernist approach. He sums up pop traditions still worth celebrating and in sounds that make them fresh and eternal.

Even better than you could imagine, Ferry makes Buckley’s threnody swing—as a wise, sincere jazz enthusiast must: The cadence saunters and identification shifts between both the song’s beckoning siren and her mortal victim. As pop’s ubiquitous three black female background singers trade places with Ferry’s wistful seafarer (“Here I am/ Here I am”), it creates an unforgettable impression of push/pull erotic compulsion. Manzanera’s guitar itself becomes a siren, rising and whining soulfully.  

In “Song to the Siren,” Ferry alludes to the great Roxy Music epic “Mother of Pearl” (1974) where his fascination with the image on a cameo took him back to the womb and then to the heights of oblivion. This cycle of classic male desire gets refreshed on Ferry’s own new composition “Reason or Rhyme” where he matches Buckley for audacity and beauty. But Ferry isn’t simply competing, he’s stirred. Through the circular description of ideas and emotion, all the tracks on Olympia express pop music’s basic impulse—to dance.

The first single “You Can Dance” could have been called Ferry’s “manifesto” if he hadn’t already used the term to title Roxy’s 1979 disco album. On “You Can Dance” Ferry observes life through the symbol of what Grace Jones called “nightclubbing” and he inserts inventive evocations of dance traditions and social habit. A favorite is the sly meaning he gives to the phrase “movers and shakers.” Another is a tribute to the days when Roxy Music rocked the bells of its Midwest American fan base: “To the Motor City/ That’s where I get my shoes.” A Detroiter like me catches the reference to movement as well as the region’s legendary sartorial  pimpitude—the sine qua non for a ladies man.

This witty lead track is also a siren call—as brilliant as Roxy’s “Love is the Drug” (from 1975’s Siren album) in its awareness of essential human longing. Ferry presents a playboy’s demeanor but he has a lover’s conscience. In the dream-like "You Can Dance" music video, Ferry performs in a club filled with women, all swaying as if mesmerized, giving in to their deep, recognizable desires—a revel of almost religious ecstasy. Like the best, swankiest disco, the song moves in waves of seduction and exhilaration. And “You Can Dance” is only the introduction to the CD’s other glorious entreaties. The album has impeccable structure and coherence in ten well-programmed tracks and its Kate Moss cover art—updating a Ferry motif that is worth a separate essay.         

One great pleasure of following Ferry’s career is watching his pop music erudition—developed from other artists and joining the legacy of Western eroticism. (“In La Dolce Vita I’ll find my beauty queen.”) More than any other male vocalist, Ferry can get away with a swooning line like “I’ll never be the same!” (from “You Can Dance” and Frantic’s “A Fool for Love” ). His unabashed emotionalism enriches masculine vocabulary. He can take a lyrical bromide like “There‘s a world beyond the sea” and use it as a troubadour’s pledge of adoration, fidelity and faith, daring a listener to be more loving. It is the height of sophistication and pop romance. In Olympia’s call-and-response (“Heartache by Numbers”), give-and-take (“Shameless”) and vision of the sublime (“Alphaville”), Ferry works his ideal on the ears, the loins, the spirit.