Customer Reviews

Avalon

5 star:		(107)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Roxy Music's albums in the 70's representing the cutting edge of avant-garde pop music. For their final release, Avalon in 1982, they shift gears towards the soulful sounds that lead singer Bryan Ferry would explore on his solo albums. As depicted on the album's cover, the band crafts a lush, airy and ethereal sound. The songs are awash in sophisticated synthesizers and longing guitar riffs. Mr. Ferry broodingly sings seductive and smart lyrics. "More Than This" is one of the most elegant love songs around. Mr. Ferry sings with longing and heartbreaking weariness and Phil Manzanera's guitar shimmers throughout. The song is quite simply a masterpiece. The title track is another elegantly crafted love song that is subtle and beautiful. "While My Heart Is Still Beating" has a terse, propulsive beat that literally thumps throughout. The only problem with Avalon is that is woeful short. The ten tracks clock in at barely over thirty-five minutes and two ("India" and "Tara") are short instrumentals. That aside, Avalon, set the standard for romantic synth-pop that countless bands in the 80's tried to copy, but could never replicate.

After reigniting their creative fuse with FLESH + BLOOD, the time seemed to be right for Roxy Music to be a band again. But there was still dissension, and Bryan Ferry seemed to have more fun with his solo career than being the leader of a band. So before AVALON was demoed, it seemed this was intended to be Roxy's second and presumably final swan song. While it's an album that could have used a follow-up, AVALON is still an appropriate farewell to Roxy. With members approaching middle age, their mellowing out in their later years now seems warranted. "More Than This" could only have come to pass as a slightly beat-driven ballad. Phil Manzanera's guitar work is his all-time greatest, and his opening figure on "More Than This" has to be the most beautiful use of electric guitar ever recorded. And for the first time in ages, Bryan Ferry turns in a convincingly emotional performance on a song that could also be a goodbye to his days as leader of Roxy Music. While they hadn't really had a hit since "Love Is The Drug", I'll bet songs like the title track, "The Space Between", "While My Heart Is Still Beating," "To Turn You On", and "Take A Chance With Me" had to be the smoothest pop music permeating from the world's radios in 1982 (I was only 2 at the time). Roxy's first "break-up" was really a hiatus of sorts, but so far, 18 years after AVALON, it appears as if Roxy Music really is no more. If that's the case, then thank you, Roxy, for going out with some style.

For years now, I've gone back and forth over what is my favorite ROXY MUSIC album. They never made a bad one, in my opinion. Even MANIFESTO has a few decent tracks. While I'd have to say that FOR YOUR PLEASURE or SIREN are the best examples of why ROXY MUSIC remain unequaled and contain some of their best work, I think that, at the end of the day, AVALON is their masterpiece.
There is a mood and atmosphere that surrounds this album that no other album, by any artist has achieved. From the haunting, opening chords of the exquisite "More Than This," to the sea-drenched melody at the end of the beautiful "Tara," the music on this disc is 37 minutes of complete and utter erotic bliss.
"More Than This," the title track, "Take a Chance with Me," "The Main Thing," and "True to Life," rank as some of the best songs in the ROXY MUSIC catalog.
Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music inspired two generations of musicians with their music. In the 1980's, their influence loomed large over the new-romantic sounds of bands like ABC, DURAN DURAN and DEPECHE MODE (to name just three!), and in the 1990's, right on up to today, one can hear and see their influence in such Brit bands like RADIOHEAD, SUEDE and PULP.
It is AVALON, their studio swan-song, that is perhaps their most groundbreaking and innovative work. Without hesitation, this is my pick for Best Album of the 1980's. Even Rolling Stone Magazine had it in their top 100 of the 80's. I'm even willing to go out on a limb and put it as my favorite album of all time- alongside the likes of The Beatles "Abbey Road," and U2's "Achtung Baby."
And, yes, it's true what's been said time and time again about AVALON- it is, undoubtedly, THE album to have playing for the ideal intimate encounter!

I've listened to this album non stop for 20 years and will never grow tired of it. I know that it might be one of those time and place type albums, but even when I play this at work, my students ask who it is. This was Bryan Ferry and company in top form, never again to be duplicated. I can't say anything that hasn't been said about it. Pick it up and call it a night.

Roxy Music's final hour was characterized by lush atmospherics similar to Joy Division or Tears for Fears. I love "Avalon" because it is so strikingly different from everything else that they have recorded. "For Your Pleasure" is one of the greatest albums of the 70s, but "Avalon" definitely tops the 80s list.
It is haunting, austere, and sparse. It is like the band died of natural causes and this album acts as a ghostly afterthought. It has been 24 years since its release, and it still gives me chills. It is the aural equivalent of those brisk October nights when the leaves change in the half-light.The depth of emotion is unrivaled in albums from the 80s or any other decade for that matter.It will certainly haunt me for the rest of my life.

OK, here's the deal: I grew up in the 80's listening to Roxy Music on vinyl and life was good. Then came the CD and record companies simply "dumped" all the world's music straight onto CD with no attention to the shortcomings of digital media. The result: my lovely music such as that found on Roxy Music's Avalon ended up sounding thin, hashy, and downright poor. I commend the remastering of this album - it is one of the best of the 80's and this treatment provides the listener to an aural treat full of rich textures, subtle sounds and lush instrumentation. I wish more companies would go back through their catalogue of 1st issue CDs and give them a once- over for the millenium. I look forward to a remastered version of "Flesh and Blood" next.

Using the legend of King Arthur's final, dying voyage to Avalon for its name and cover art, Roxy Music bid its fans farewell with this hopelessly romantic, completely beautiful album. There's no point on trying to embellish on what most of the other reviewers have already mentioned about AVALON but I'm compelled to say that while I have been a Roxy Music fan for a long, long time, I have not been much of a fan of the heavily produced, synthesizer ladened songs that proliferated in the early 80s (read Flock of Sea Gulls, Human League, etc.). But AVALON was much different. Some of the songs here are textured and layered, but not bogged down. There's an airiness to other tunes but they don't become insubstantial or gossamer.

Overall, it's the intelligence of the lyrics that really separated AVALON from just about everything else back then. The twin themes of mortality and desire pervade most of the tunes on the first half of the album. But Bryan Ferry doesn't wallow in self-pity for long. Just when the songs start to appear to be downers, along comes "To Turn You On", an incredibly upbeat, love ballad. While its theme of salvation through passion is not new, its sincerity and romance is. I'm glad that Ferry made room for some of the positive aspects of life. And I'm glad that the music world of the early 1980s made room for AVALON.

I lost my virginity to this album, and if you haven't yet, you will too. What more do you need to know? Lush, soulful, even rocking in its way ... flawlessly played and produced, beautifully sequenced ... oh yeah, and with the possible exception of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" and the Rolling Stones' "Tattoo You," the greatest make-out record ever made.

I used to try to get into these guys in the 70's, but it always seemed to me that there was always this perpetual conflict as to what they were wanting to define themselves as musically. Most people who were fans of Roxy Music, that I knew personally, had odd tastes to begin with--outer fringe music so-to-speak. Who would've thought this infinite masterpiece [AVALON] would have emerged? Not too far into the eighties a girl who worked at an independent record store (when there used to be such a thing) used to inform me of stuff she thought was currently interesting to her. One visit shortly after Avalon's release she strongly urged me to check it out. At first I rejected the notion. Roxy Music? Nah, not my thing. But she assured me that it wasn't like their old stuff. I had a couple extra bucks and, if anything, decided to take a chance on her opinion. I've made plenty of mistakes in life, but this ain't one of 'em! This piece of work is like the Mona Lisa. In it's some 23 years of existence, I have never tired from it, it always captivates my mood, and I have only ever received gratitude from those I've introduced it to. Bottom Line: If this is missing from your collection, your collection is incomplete.

Roxy's last-minute masterwork starts with "More Than This": 4 and 1/2 of the most perfect minutes ever committed to magnetism... and, stunninly, it almost manages to operate at that level over its entire playing legnth. The album is, simply put, brilliant from start to finish. The aching beauty of the opener dissolves into the world-weary chug of the bottom heavy "The Space Between", and then comes the smoldering "Avalon": a prototypical example of what has become known as a "come-down song". The songs is tired and desolate, almost threatening to decay into nothingess, then ressurected by ghostly female vox and sparkling guitar. The next track, "India" is one of two wonderfully compact and moody instrumentals...The other real highlight is "To Turn You On"-- a starkly beautiful and hugeley romantic tune which basically lays the blueprints down for the next decade-and-a-half of synth-pop, new-wave and electronica. The sound of the album has always been a selling point, and now, in the new Bob Ludwig-mastered HDCD version, you can rest assured that this about as good as electric music has ever sounded. These songs are like sonic sculptures, subtely blending the sparse, distinct playing with waves of spectral synths and an eerie sense of space and ambience to suggest the gigantic sense of desolation which the album explores. "Pristine" does not even begin to do justice to Rhett Davies production--"Crystaline" or "Lucid" are probably better adjectives. Sonically, it's easily one of a handful of high watermarks in pop music. Overall, it's the perfect end-of-the-party album: As the first sparks of sunlight appear on the horizon, the buzz wears off, the room is empty and demolished, these are the sounds you should hear. Ferry's signature "I'd-rather-be-doing-something-else" delivery, combined with the stark, gurgling and shimmering sounds of Roxy speaks of loss, regret and fleeting glory like no one else ever has. It is one of the finest intentional "final albums" a pop group has ever released, as it seems not just about the end of a partnership, or even the end of a "party", but the end of an era, a sad and sweet end to all things.