As Time Goes By

by

Bryan Ferry

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Love songs have lost their feeling as singers with limited talent attempt to convey the emotion necessary to make a real love song work. Bryan Ferry not only makes the love songs on this CD work, he wrings them for all their worth, without falling into over-sentimentalized or melodramatic phrasing. His voice is smooth and elegant, allowing the lyrics to speak for themselves. Unconcerned with his own style (or perfecting a different one), Ferry has unconsciously fashioned that rare commodity, seamless blending of the old and new. The orchestrations are heavily weighted with period sounds, yet Ferry's voice never falls into croonership, or overextends itself to imitate singers of the past. Ferry's audience is sophistcated and Ferry plays this card to its fullest. The songs are obviously chosen with care and even those we might think we're tired of hearing (most notably, the title track, As Time Goes By,) sound fresh and speak not only about the joy of love, but also the melnacholy of love as well, which may be Ferry's greatest asset, true melancholy without the angst that mars so many other love songs. Not simply willing to re-issue the quaint and nostalgic, Ferry seems to be reaching for something more and finds it in such numbers as Sweet And Lovely, Love Me Or Leave Me, and the poetic and usually over-wrought, September Song. With these songs, Ferry reaches into the past, to bring us up to date on the sorry state of modern love songs. The songs on this CD are prime examples of the (almost) lost art of lyric writing.