Review
'Avalon' stands as the swan song of Roxy Music's spectacular evolution, a silken dream of an album that transformed Bryan Ferry and company from art-rock provocateurs into masters of sophisticated adult pop. The album's sonic landscape feels like wandering through a moonlit garden party where everyone's wearing white linen and sipping something far too expensive. 'More Than This' opens the affair with what might be the most perfectly distilled pop gem in the Roxy canon, while the title track 'Avalon' swirls around you like perfumed mist, Ferry's voice a textured whisper against Phil Manzanera's delicate guitar work.
Drawing inspiration from the mystical island of Arthurian legend, the album wraps its themes of love and longing in arrangements so lush you could practically sink into them. What makes 'Avalon' particularly special is how it manages to be both achingly romantic and coolly detached at once – rather like Ferry himself at a cocktail party, one imagines. The band's final studio album became their commercial pinnacle, proving that sometimes the most elegant exit is also the most triumphant. In the years since, these songs have become the soundtrack to countless sophisticated evenings, the musical equivalent of that perfect martini that arrives just when you need it most. - Aurelia
