Another time, another place, another album of jazzed-up Roxy Music chestnuts and solo fare from Bryan Ferry. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, the Roxy frontman did a pretty swanky job of it on 2012’s The Jazz Age — and on the more recent soundtrack to the Netflix series Babylon Berlin, which was the original home to a handful of these tracks (including Dance Away, Reason or Rhyme, Bitters End and Chance Meeting). If you heard either of his previous nostalgic sojourns, you know what you’re in for: 42 minutes of zippidy-doo-dah tempos and clip-clop percussion, wah-wah trumpets and rooting-tooting clarinets, barrelhouse pianos and sweet strings, slightly distant production and arrangements that split the diff between a Prohibition-era speakeasy, a Dixieland nightclub and a Weimar Republic cabaret. And of course, it all comes elegantly topped with the eternally suave, perfectly poised Ferry’s hushed romantic crooning, swooning and moon-in-June-ing. Forget doing the strand, daddy; you’d best bone up on the Jitterbug, the Lindy Hop, the Charleston and the Slow Drag if you wanna cut a rug to this one with your sweetest flapper.
