Bryan Ferry And Amelia Barratt – Loose Talk (BMG)
★★★★½
For his first album of new music in 11 years, Bryan Ferry doesn’t sing. As he put it to CP: “I drone or hum along in the background of some pieces, but generally I’m not there.” Before you rush to call Loose Talk a birrova swizz, give it a listen: this is as Spirit Of Roxy Music as anything in Ferry’s storied solo career.
Notorious perfectionist as he is, it’s hard for Ferry to come up with songs that both sound like Slave To Love or Tokyo Joe and make them something new. And that’s the point of Loose Talk. Unless you heard the pulsating banger Star on last year’s Ferry compendium Retrospective, what he’s been up to alongside Amelia Barratt will be a welcome surprise.
The methodology is so simple – performance artist Barratt sends Ferry new readings, he finds music to match – that one of the biggest surprises about their collaboration is that it’s taken Ferry 52 years since These Foolish Things to get someone else to do the singing and lyrics bit, the clot.
Minimalist Approach
At least Ferry’s struck gold immediately with Barratt, whose precise diction still leaves room for wit and heartbreak: her pronunciation of “surprise,” “comeuppance” and “turpentine” convey more drama than many singers’ whole albums.
It’s a minimalist approach Ferry takes delight in matching. Largely played on a beat-up piano he’s owned since 1973, its off-kilter resonance is perfect for these vivid stories.
The bouncing, elusive riff found in Stand Near Me is an absolute earworm, Cowboy Hat is a Patricia Routledge episode of Talking Heads via Orbital, while White Noise is likely to have you in bits even if you’re not sure why. It builds up to the title track, a star-studded assemblage of players getting delirious behind Barratt’s tumbling, restless monologue. Over 50 years in, Ferry is still freshening up his act – and in Barratt he belatedly seems to have found an ideal new conspirator.
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