Avalon

If you wanted to play someone the sound of sophistication — not the idea of it, but the actual texture — you could do worse than to put on Avalon and dim the lights.

Roxy Music’s 1982 album, their last, is the sound of a band that began as art-rock provocateurs arriving, a decade later, at a place of total smoothness — and somehow making that smoothness profound rather than empty. Bryan Ferry’s voice has by this point become an instrument of pure suggestion, a crooning murmur that seems to be confiding something just out of earshot. The arrangements are lush, twilit, immaculate, every surface polished to a glow.

It is mood music in the highest sense. The title track drifts in on a bed of synthesizers and a wordless vocal from a guest singer that floats over the whole thing like fog over water. “More Than This” is one of the great songs of romantic resignation, beautiful and a little heartbroken, Ferry sounding like a man who has accepted that the best of something is already behind him and has decided to be elegant about it. The whole record has that quality — pleasure shadowed by its own ending.

Some critics have always been suspicious of Avalon, distrustful of anything this polished, hearing the surfaces and missing the feeling beneath. But the gloss is not a hiding place; it is the point. The album is about sophistication as a kind of melancholy — the elegance of people who have seen enough to know that beauty does not last, and who choose to make something beautiful anyway, knowing it is a farewell.

That it was Roxy Music’s last album gives it a retrospective perfection. They went out not with a bang but with the most graceful exit in pop — a record so complete, so self-contained, that there was nothing left to say. It is the sound of a door closing softly on a beautiful room.

Play it late, with someone, with the lights low and a drink in hand. Avalon does not demand attention so much as set a temperature. It is the most romantic record about the end of romance ever made.

Avalon is built for low light and a good system. The vinyl suits it.