Let's Stick Together is the least campy of Bryan Ferry's three solo albums. Rather than do suave interpretations of oldies as diverse as "It's My Party" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," he has chosen to blend less loaded reworkings with reinterpretations of his own earlier work with Roxy Music.

Like Dylan on his new Hard Rain album, Ferry has fortified a style in which virtually all his previous songs can be recycled. (Four of the songs here come from the first Roxy Music album.) So, while Pete Sinfield's production of "Chance Meeting" made the song sound like King Crimson with literary delusions, the new reading sounds like an anglicized Rolling Thunder Revue. "Sea Breezes," which originally had the dreaminess of the Incredible String Band, has journeyed from the vegetarian to the carnivorous, thanks to the inspired playing of the band.

The non-Roxy renovations aren't as consistently intriguing. Strangely, the blues songs—"Let's Stick Together" and Jimmy Reed's "Shame, Shame, Shame"—work best. The only shame is that Ferry didn't get around to Shirley and Co.'s rather delirious and different song of the same name.

Some of the covers are sluggish. The Lennon-McCartney number sounds like a rejected Bette Midler arrangement, while Gallagher and Lyle's "Heart on My Sleeve" is a bit too cautiously contemporary. But Let's Stick Together proves that Ferry's solo albums don't represent a separate identity from Roxy Music so much as they wryly embellish one of rock's most intriguing sensibilities. (RS 226)

WAYNE ROBINS