Frantic

Easily the most eclectic album of Bryan Ferry’s career, 2002’s Frantic shows that his interest still ran in several directions, but he no longer felt the need to fuse those ideas into a single concept. Thus you get the blues of “Goin’ Down” next to the French opera of “Ja Nun Hons Pris” next to the Cajun folk music of “Goodnight Irene.” Ferry sounds more relaxed than he has in years, which is perhaps the result of being surrounded by friends old (Mick Green, Robin Trower, Chris Spedding) and new (Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Alison Goldfrapp). He's comfortable inhabiting a song as eerie and cinematic as “San Simeon” and then turning around for a straightforward and delightfully rocking run through Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The echoes of Roxy Music that run through “Cruel” and “Hiroshima…” come to prominence on “I Thought,” which reunites Ferry and Brian Eno after a 30-year separation. An appropriate finale, “I Thought” is also a divine pop song: sweet and swelling and dreamy in the way that Eno and Ferry could only accomplish in partnership.