3 stars (out of 4)

For "Olympia" (Astralwerks), his first album based on original songwriting in eight years (and 13th studio album overall), Bryan Ferry and his coproducers Rhett Davies and Johnson Somerset are like hosts for an elegantly decadent after-hours party for one in the basement of a Weimar Republic cabaret.

Ferry sounds cool as ever, as if he were lounging around in a dinner jacket contemplating his misadventures, lost opportunities or the lack of really good limousine service in the posh English countryside. He’s always been among the most slyly witty singers of his generation, his remorse tethered to a healthy streak of self-aware humor. “I’d do the can-can if I could,” he mutters on “You can Dance.” But what is great about Ferry is that he and the listener know that it’s all just a disguise for darker anxieties.

Trolling for love in all the wrong places, Ferry has matured into the role he has always played since his Roxy Music heyday. He finds soul – or, even more terrifyingly, the lack of it – beneath a surface glamour that is pure pop. Old art student that he is, Ferry names the album after a somewhat scandalous Manet erotic painting and decorates the CD cover with a Roxy-like siren, model Kate Moss.

The music has little in common with Roxy’s early, subversive art-rock; it feels more like a sequel to the group’s 1983 finale, the ballad-stuffed “Avalon.” That album’s lush textures were swathed in swoon-worthy melodies, and “Olympia” works a similarly subtle vein of gently swaying night music, perfect for slow dancing and whatever activities naturally follow. The well-dressed arrangements are appointed with instrumental cameos from famous friends and disciples: Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, David Gilmour, Flea, plus ex-Roxy bandmates Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Brian Eno. But their contributions rarely stand out as anything more than just one more texture in a beautiful yet melancholy soundscape. It’s luxurious as all get-out, and yet vaguely disturbing – this is mood music designed to unsettle as much as soothe. When paired with a melody as powerful and poignant as Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren,” plaintive as “Reason or Rhyme” or wrenching as “No Face, No Name, No Number,” it’s absolutely undeniable.

greg@gregkot.com