Caught in the Carousel

Shimmering Sidewalks and Curfews of Bedrooms: Bryan Ferry’s Olympia

Bryan Ferry by Adam Whitehead

The Voice is back.

In a year when big names have reappeared after search parties had long given up hope only to deliver the worst album of their respective careers (Sade, Peter Gabriel), Bryan Ferry’s first album of new material in eight years shows that he’s as fresh and relevant as ever.

While rumors of this album swirled like so many of the dizzying performances of the several guitarists who would eventually play on it, there seemed reason for concern. Ferry started courting the European club crowd, and in 2009 he was the lead vocalist on an endless ten minute European “club hit” by DJ Hell. And then word came that he’d also soon be working with Groove Armada, Scissor Sisters, Flea and Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. There was a whiff of desperation. One wondered if Ferry were trying too hard. And if so, why should he have to? It’s often been a head-scratcher as to why Ferry isn’t a household name in the States, much less in inducted in the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame (which remains doubly insipid without him in it). It’s long been music’s Golden Ticket just to be asked to appear on a Ferry album: Bete Noire, his final album of the 1980’s featured over forty musicians (but in the 1980’s Ferry was a man whose every move was written about in all caps). So one empathizes with Ferry, because despite the full court press of several PR machines, it doesn’t seem that, despite its shimmers of brilliance, the new albumis going to rectify or resituate any of all that.

The star-studded Olympia (even Kate Moss has a role as a femme fatale on the album cover) opens up with the unmistakable first seven seconds of Roxy Music’s gorgeous swan song, “True to Life.” But that elegiac tone is quickly disposed of and “You Can Dance” digs right in, trying to force its way into your head. This is new ground, because Ferry’s music—like the man himself—has always made inroads with nothing but grace and élan. The insistence of the song is a bit jarring at first, but patience is rewarded. The groove is so thick and layered that this song becomes the best piece of black clothing in your wardrobe.

The next track, “Alphaville,” is vintage Ferry through and through. From the faint female dialogue at the start, to the swirling Eno orchestration of the song, and of course that voice—that iconic, quivering, wavering, tapered voice—that loves tracks full of mysteries and insinuations, all in the service of lines like “I’m hungry for your lies/Your screams and whispers.”

The much-talked about collaboration with Scissor Sisters, “Heartache By Numbers,” has a lighter canvas than one is used to in Ferry’s later work. But it’s also got a lovely thumping beat and only the bridge toward song’s end is a misstep; it goes for pop when it should have gone for nocturne.

“Me Oh My,” is emblematic twilight Ferry; smoldering and hesitating, it’s a bedraggled lothario trawling the night for one last fix. Love, we all know by now, is Ferry’s drug. The cliché fits because as much as Presley owned the hip shake, Jagger owns the prance, Dylan owns the mumble, and Cohen owns the dark humor, Ferry owns the persona of the handsome stranger, left outside of too many of life’s more decadent obligations. He is after all the man responsible for one of the greatest lines in music, 1973’s purr to an inflatable doll: “I blew up your body/But you blew my mind.”

Bryan Ferry

The club-friendly Groove Armada collaboration, “Shameless,” has a shimmer and a bravado that gives the record another jolt of exuberance. And it’s a nice lift before the second act which begins with a cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren.” In addition to guitar work from the wisely-chosen Nile Rodgers and Oliver Thompson, the three other guitarists on this one track—David Gilmour, Phil Manzanera, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood—all combine to create a near-trance inducing ode to . . . a Roxy Music album? One can’t listen to this song without thinking of 1975’s Siren. The loveliness of the song is so incantatory, that it carries the listener over the next two tracks: the slighty-lazy AM-radio-friendly cover of Traffic’s “No Face, No Name, No Number,” and the funk desires of the album’s real clunker, “BF Bass (Ode to Olympia).” The title alone of the latter track makes one suspect Ferry of trying a bit too hard, and then the passing reference to Facebook, and the insistent chorus of “Love, love, you fit me like a glove” only confirms as much.

But Ferry, is of course, an artist of the highest order; he would never end an album on a reaching note. For Roxy Music’s legendary final album, Avalon, he famously took the trademark starlet pin-up down from the cover, draped heavy velvets over every inch of her exposed flesh before having her turn her back to the camera while Ferry himself orchestrated the album’s funereal fadeout, “Tara.” And three years later, in his masterpiece Boys and Girls he ended with the title track’s final rip of the drum, letting it echo through the empty streets at nighttime, searching for those last two lovers who had strolled the shimmering sidewalks but had yet to succumb to Ferry’s curfew of bedrooms and hotel suites.

So if in the end, Olympia isn’t quite the comeback that Ferry clearly would like it to be, it still offers as fine a closing one-two punch as anything since Kate Bush’s “Nocturn” and “Aerial” roared into Aerial’s ether in 2005. “Reason or Rhyme” is Ferry at his most touching and ethereal. Its sparse lyric and dreamy atmospherics reminds one of Avalon’s “The Space Between.” The difference now is that Ferry is sixty-five and when he sings “Why must you shed such tender tears/In the evening of your years?” the question is urgent, the voice is vulnerable, the answer necessary. It is a gorgeous trance-inducing seven minutes that, in a strange way, resets the tone of the album and lays out the carpet for the F. Scott Fitzgerald finale, “Tender is the Night.”

This quiet, gorgeous ballad starts with the smooth buzz of a dial spanning the frequency spectrum of an old radio. A piano soon takes over and the hushed immediacy of Ferry’s vocals reminds you that it’s as great a musical instrument as we have across the musical landscape. The song has a decadent whiff of nostalgia to it, as if the song itself is proof that grown men do in fact spend summers along the east coast, the grassy hillocks tinting their bare feet green; that these characters are real and not just the imaginings of an elegantly choreographed photo shoot for a preppy summer line of an eponymous brand of clothing.

“It makes no sense,” Ferry sings, “you think of me/out of place/in your society/I wanna be where strangers meet/I wanna hold you at the dark end of the street.” And so the genius again has hit his marks. He’s earned the Fitzgeraldian title of the song as he paints as fine an image possible of the struggle of love among society’s clashing social circles. The song is so hypnotic in its movement, that the listener is able to conjure the Shakespearean moths, the bothery mosquitoes, and the once-envious fireflies as they form their exodus from the “dark end of the street” where a couple is locked in an embrace, the street quiet and tender, the only movement the slow sway of the glass casing of the streetlight that has been left open while its removed bulb is cradled for the moment in the woman’s purse.

—Thomas Cooney