Avalon (1982)

You can't really call this the best Roxy Music album, because in a lot of ways it's hard to make the case that it is a Roxy Music album. Mackay and Manzanera are reduced to sidemen, and after Bryan Ferry they're the only originals left. But, damn, is it sweet and pretty, impossible to resist, even overwhelming—which might only mean that you have just developed a taste for adult-oriented rock. But there's little point denying its effects. At a certain vantage, it feels like the entire world opening up wide. All of the art here is softly compressed into the structures and melodies and layers and nuances of affect. It barely moves, but it saturates every available space. Even in the background, where arguably it belongs, it calls insistently. It's meant to lull, seduce, beguile, draw you over, win you to its side—Ferry perhaps attempting to actualize his never-ending riff as the consummate gigolo. If it has its antecedents in the previous two late-period albums, Manifesto and Flesh + Blood, not even they prepared anyone for this. And if it is essentially the end of the line for Roxy Music as an enterprise—a live EP and an anthology (and not the first) is all the more we got from them—somehow in memory it seems to herald the beginning of a long, slow fade into a vanishing relevance textured by brief and occasional flashes of interest. I guess I must be thinking of Bryan Ferry's solo career from that point forward because all these years later it's as clear as can be. This is an end, not a beginning. And by the way what is that, a Viking on the cover? (Actually, it's Bryan Ferry's girlfriend at the time, Lucy Helmore, wearing a helmet to play King Arthur.)