Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt - Loose Talk - New Clear LP
Format New LP Label: The Leaf Label Cat. No. MSRBFABCLEVIN
Released: 28/03/2025
Barcode: 199066398920
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.”
Hard Times Furious Dancing is an invitation to all those lost in the unrelenting noise of the present, to leave it all behind and come together in the forest. Driven by the primitive thrust of their single-oscillator ‘log’ synths, high and low culture collide in a surreal, free flowing narrative - but the rhythm is universal. This is easily the closest Snapped Ankles have come to capturing their rapturous live energy in the studio. It’s everything you’ve come to know and love from a Snapped Ankles album, amped all the way up until the ground begins to shake.
The sound of Hard Times Furious Dancing evolved at Snapped Ankles’ South London ‘Forest Rayve’ club nights in 2024 in response to that age-old primal urge to bring people together and make them move. It’s the first time the woodwose have road tested new material to this extent before committing it to tape since debut album Come Play the Trees, and in doing so have harnessed that feral energy once again. This surreal human/woodwose connection is the very best release from an algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself. Dance it all loose.