Bryan Ferry - Loose Talk [Compact disc]

Fifty-three years since he delivered the bolt-from-the-blue of Roxy Music’s debut LP as his calling card, Ferry’s latest project is just as startlingly unexpected an arrival. On the one hand, Loose Talk is his first album of new music since 2014’s Avonmore. On the other, little here, from the sounds and shapes of that music, to the uses it gets put to, resembles any previous Bryan Ferry album. Then again – on the third hand – it’s also a piece that is deeply rooted in his past half-century of work.

“A conversation between two artists,” is how Amelia Barratt, one of the artists involved, describes Loose Talk. “Something we’ve created together that neither could do on our own,” adds Bryans Ferry, her interlocutor in the creative exchange. “And, for me, it seems to have opened up a whole new chapter for my work.”