The total number of records I have in my collection that I can play straight through without skipping tracks, I could probably count on one hand. Godflesh’s Pure; maybe one of Keiji Haino’s live sets. Yoko Kanno’s Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex album. Roxy Music’s Avalon. The list is short for a good reason: it’s a sign of the elect.
Granted, some of that is due to the way the album format has become fractured and fractured again—first by the CD, which allowed tracks to be re-ordered at will or dropped entirely; then by digital music systems, which are more song- than album-oriented. But there’s also the fact that precious few albums hold together that well as a whole: sometimes there’s just not enough strong, sustained material in that particular vein to support a whole record (the last couple of Nine Inch Nails releases felt like this for me), and sometimes the artist in question just works best as a creator of singles rather than anything more ambitious. It’s hard work to come up with a batch of songs that hang together well as a whole and survive being cut apart and heard independently.
Avalon wasn’t the first record I’d heard that accomplished that trick—the first was probably Peter Gabriel’s So—and it wasn’t the first Roxy Music album I’d heard, either (that being Siren). But in both categories it remains my favorite, simply because there isn’t a bad song on it, and there are more truly great songs on the record than most albums ever have a right to provide. Some albums achieve this sort of thing by being compositionally pathbreaking or socially daring; Avalon gets there by dint of just being perfectly listenable.
It’s also not what could be called a typical Roxy Music album; in fact, it’s probably the most unrepresentative and “mainstream” album in their collection. Siren is cited as being their other best moment and the one most like the conventional Roxy Music sound, and I agree on both counts; it’s another great record, and at some point I need to get around to replacing the cassette tape version of the album I had (before I played it to death in my car, that is) and write about it as well. But Avalon sits most comfortably with me for the broadest number of reasons.
Roxy Music themselves get lumped into the “art rock” category, if only for a lack of any other suitable category, and probably also for the presence of Brian Eno on the first few records. His departure allowed the rest of the group to drift into slightly more commercially-accessible territory, but there’s a strange Eno-like aura hanging over the band in Avalon, accentuated all the more by Bob Clearmountain’s ethereal production techniques. The group’s sound went from experimentally fractious to balladeer-smooth over time, but the one instrument that remained consistently appealing (and that gets displayed to best effect here) was lead singer Bryan Ferry’s creamy voice. After the band’s dissolution—this was to be their last studio effort, at least until recently—he went on to a solo career where he plied many of the same bits of gorgeous, elegically-wrought melancholy in various styles. He may have been a merchant of decadence and heartache, but he made you feel like it was all worth it, that he sang it all this way only because it was better to lose glory than to never have it at all, and to celebrate what we had in the time we had it.
“There is nothing / More than this,” Ferry declares on the opening track, and it’s left carefully open-ended if he’s being despondent or content—and not just in his delivery, either, but in the way the song itself straddles dejected melancholy and wistful joy. The whole record walks the same tightrope between dejection and elation: when Ferry beguiles another to “Take a Chance With Me” (as per the song of the same name), he’s not doing it for the sake of the other, but to try and goad himself back into believing in love: “In my time too much love / Has made me sad for so long … Heaven knows, I believe / You can take a chance with me”.
Most musical products of any given period date badly when they’re only okay, because the flaws in the music call attention to the circumstances of its creation rather than anything more transcendent. We listen and think, now there’s a synth sound people haven’t used in a while, because the music itself isn’t strong enough to override such nitpicking. It sounds obvious, but it’s not the sort of thing we normally attune ourselves to. One of the beauties of Avalon is that while it’s unquestionably of its moment in time (1982), it never sounds grotesquely dated—if anything, it’s managed to step neatly from being an FM staple of the moment into something like a musical timelessness.
That sense of timelessness leaks into everything that happens on the album. When Ferry sings “When it’s raining in New York / on Fifth Avenue” on “To Turn You On”, he’s not singing about some spot on a map but the mythical New York and Fifth Avenue that’s in the heart of every lonely romantic who’s ever pounded the pavement of a city. The way the music jumps and shifts in the chorus for that song, too—like the swell of an orchestra in an overture—adds to it all the more. There are moments of the same quiet transcendence in every single song throughout the record, and they all add up to make the whole thing transcendent in a way that breaks free of its moment in pop history.
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