Bryan Ferry hasn't released a record in more than five years. He had been working on an album to follow up the exquisite Bête Noire, from 1987, but he couldn't quite get it right. He's a perfectionist, which is as apparent in his hairdo – precisely styled in pieces that hang over his long nose like a canopy – as in his songs. So he's recorded his third album of cover versions, Taxi (the first two were These Foolish Things and Another Time, Another Place, in the Seventies), to buy time.

Ferry's a consummate stylist. With Roxy Music, he changed the face of pop music and made it art, both experimental and decadent. Not unlike Cole Porter, Ferry has used a distinctive manner – erudite, glamorous and subversively sexy – as a bridge from working-class England to Old World aristocracy. When he takes on other artists' work, he doesn't simply filter it through his shivering voice with cool detachment, he dives in and twists it nearly beyond recognition.

On "I Put a Spell on You," he replaces Screamin' Jay Hawkins's creepy bite with a kind of swirling, electronic space-age echo and warm female backing voices. In Ferry's voice, distinctly male, the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" isn't so much fluffy, romantic wonder as it is a dark, despondent plea. Ferry the crooner delivers "Just One Look" and "Girl of My Best Friend" (best known as an Elvis Presley number) slowly, in a wash of synth and organ. The oddest choice has to be "Amazing Grace." A magnificent, transporting song in almost any context, this version is soulless, as if Ferry got too caught up in inspecting the song to feel it.

The metaphorical "Taxi" (an obscure song Ferry had heard only once long ago), on the other hand, is perfectly arranged with strings and piano to sound lush and beautiful. But as in a Victorian sitting room that's been the site of many indiscretions, something perverse lingers in the air despite the decorous setting. (RS 659)

CHRISTIAN WRIGHT