Roxy Music
“I’m more impressed
than I thought I would be, especially about
“Terrorist!” – Cletus W. Retard
“It’s hookier than a fisherman's wharf and slicker than a New Jersey Italian.” – Capn Marvel
Albums Reviewed:
Roxy Music
is exhibit #2,895 of why Americans, at least compared to the Brits, have shit
musical taste. One of the biggest bands
in
Roxy started out in 1972 as a completely weird amalgamation of fifties boogie glam rock rips and strangely fragmented pseudo-rootsy music, possibly ironic kitsch culture (I don’t know how much self-conscious irony had worked its way into pop music in the early seventies, but it’s a quality that would certainly be attributed to the band today), futuristic keyboard/synth sounds, hard rocking instrumental prowess, and superb, if odd, songwriting. The band’s unique sound was a result of the creative tensions between lead singer/keyboardist/songwriter/lyricist/idea man Bryan “I am the coolest man alive!” Ferry and ahead-of-his-time synth nutjob Brian Eno, and was added to both by the fact that their guitarist (Phil Manzanera) was buddies with Robert Fripp and by the fact that they had a full-time saxophone/oboe player (Andy Mackay) whose musical influence was equal to the wannabe-prog guitarist. The bright, colorful, weird yet catchy, and utterly-impossible-to-categorize music on their debut album sounds exactly like what you’d expect the group of weirdos pictured above to produce, and that’s the best way I can think of to describe it. After one more album, the tensions between Ferry and Eno became too strong, and Eno left to embark on an influential solo career and an even more influential producing career, but then, see, with jaw-droppingly talented violin/keyboard whiz Eddie Jobson slotting into the lineup, Roxy actually got better. Now Ferry’s personal plaything, they developed a kind of urbane, debonair, slickly produced yet still unique brand of European-sounding pop-rock that matched Ferry’s persona to a tee. There’s a logical progression from Roxy Music to Siren that’s a wonder to behold. The band continued to get less and less weird and more and more accessible, but they never lost their unique, intoxicating, creative edge and got, simply, better, and as I’ve already mentioned I consider Siren to be their creative apex. Then they took a four year break and came back as a generic and mediocre pop band that has about as much to do with the name “Roxy Music” as I do. Still, even that period isn’t gawd-awful, and Avalon, for what it is, is actually pretty good.
Roxy had gobs of musical chops all over the place, but Bryan Ferry is what puts them over the top. Not even considering the fact that he wrote all the songs and lyrics and was the driving force behind the band’s carefully crafted, stylish image (and album covers! Hoo-doggy!), the man is (or was in the band’s heyday) one of the best frontmen in rock history. It might take a little while to get used to that vibrato of his (especially on the first couple of records), and it’s quite possible he could come off as a smarmy douchebag at first, but eventually he will break your heart, and as the band moved toward more conventional (but still very intelligent) love-themed material toward the end of their classic period, he just got (say it again!) better and better. Certain sections of “End of the Line” absolutely kill me. The guy was amazing. Plus, he was one of the coolest men who ever lived, and when Mick Jagger hooked up with Jerry Hall he was getting Ferry’s sloppy seconds. Ha! And yes, he was better than Geddy Lee.
My overall opinion of Roxy Music isn’t quite matched by their individual album scores because of the band’s nasty habit of sticking a song or two that just aren’t that good on every record of theirs. Their first two albums, when Eno was trying to yank the band towards more distinctly odd and atmospheric material, are actually extremely inconsistent, and while the Ferry-dominated classic trio of Stranded, Country Life, and Siren are much-improved in this respect, the band just never produced that one “epoch-defining” classic album (though Siren comes close). Every album has at least one absolutely jaw-dropping song on it, though, and most have a bunch (not the last three, though; you can probably skip those).
Lineup! In the totally awesome picture above, from left to right in the back row are drummer Paul Thompson (not Ozzy Osbourne), Ferry, and Manzanera, while kneeling in the front are Eno on the left and Mackay on the right. The only guy I haven’t mentioned so far is Thompson, who was the perfect drummer for this band. His rock-solid, consistent, hard-rocking 4/4 backbeat provided a great basis for all the diverse elements on top. If these guys had had someone like Carl Palmer on drums, they wouldn’t have been nearly as good as they were. You may also have noticed I haven’t mentioned a bassist yet, and the reason for this is that they never had one! At least not officially. Graham Simpson played bass on Roxy Music, John Porter on For Your Pleasure, and John Gustafson on the last three classic period albums, but none of them were ever considered an “official” member of the band, and live they could have had any of ten or twenty guys playing at a given concert (including even John Wetton for a little bit). For their last three soulless studio hack creations, soulless studio hacks provided the bass parts. And that is the end of the introduction.
And, onto the reviews!
David Dickson (ddickso2@uccs.edu) writes:
Honolulu ROCKS, you dadgummed tourist.
Bryan Ferry? More like FRYIN' BERRY, if you ask the cook. . .
I like Roxy Music, though. At least the one album I've heard so far
(For Your Pleasure). I give it an 8.52!
Richard Bullen (tummybearhug@yahoo.com)
writes:
Sea Breezes is the best song
off the first album
sorry...you shared your opinion, im
givin you mine
also Flesh and Blood is NOT that bad
Its a great album...its just a different style than the
earlier ones
and country life is the best....anyway..just throwin in my 2 cents
and you should pick em up on
180 gram vinyl
first 2 albums available now
(and
they come with really cool posters)
Richard Bullen (tummybearhug@yahoo.com)
writes:
the bogus man kicks ass...i
could listen to it over and over
and no im not on
drugs......some vodka helps though
Roxy Music (1972)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “If There
Is Something”
Roxy’s first album, especially
when you consider it was released in 1972, is an often astoundingly interesting
mixture of old-fashioned pop/rock (with country/doo-wop/etc. influences)
courtesy of
And thus I echo the general chorus that the 2nd side of this thing really isn’t all that much to look at, but let’s leave that for a little later, shall we? Good. Because side 1 is probably the most consistently interesting, influential, and well-conceived side in the Roxy catalog. I told you “Re-make/Re-model” completely rocks my ass, and I mean it, but listen! The rock is based completely on Paul Thompson’s pounding drums and Andy Mackay’s squirting sax riffs. Manzanera’s main contribution is soloing over the main pounding, and Eno’s just sitting there adding all sorts of odd texture, but the whole package is just so cool! This is the one album where Roxy weren’t at least partially going for some sort of Bryan Ferry-dominated, lush, ultra-hip Europop, and as such it’s the one where the contributions of the individual members are easiest to discern most of the time, like Bryan’s half-crazy yelps over the bubbling stew of rock his band has cooked up in this song (“I could talk talk talk talk talk myself to death!”). Also dig how the rock just stops every few bars for an individual member to do something awesome, like a quick little sax blast from Mackay, a bass riff from whoever the hell was playing bass at the time (the intro says Graham Simpson, but I got this information from Wikipedia, so really who the hell knows), a quick guitar or drum solo, or just some sound Eno came up with by slamming one of his porn mags into his Moog. This isn’t the best song on the album, but it functions perfectly as an introduction to what made early Roxy Music so interesting.
“Ladytron” (by the way, just as the Talking Heads prove, you know you’re cool when bands name themselves after your album tracks) is the only track 2 in the “classic” Roxy era that doesn’t do the obvious “track 1 – rocker; track 2 – ballad” thing, even though it starts out as one, led again by rock-solid (but somewhat, I dunno, slippery?) rhythm section work as Bryan croons about his lady “looking for a lover.” After like a minute, though, and after a short break with what sounds like Mackay’s oboe (which just as easily could be Eno doing something Enoey) and a return to the main “ballad,” the song completely disregards the idea of being a ballad for a musical outro (if you can call something an “outro” when it takes up more than half the song) full of pounding tom drums and guitar blasts and more Eno “sounds” that rocks just about as much as the whole of “Re-make/Re-model,” which leads us into the album’s 6+ minute centerpiece “If There is Something,” a song everyone splooges over and about which I will be no different. As a brief description, I’ll just say the song effortlessly morphs from an upbeat country guitar-soloin’ rompin’ good time to a darkly depressing minor key dirge without Paul Thompson changing the drum beat once and does this so effortlessly and convincingly it manages to be jarring and barely noticeable at the same time (neat trick, huh?). It’s one thing to read this in a review, but it’s something entirely different to listen to the song for the first time and actually hear them do it. It’s insane. The keys are a) how fucking good this band is and b) Ferry, who can do literally any emotion he wants with his voice and convince you he’s feeling that emotion at that second. He’s fantastic. And they follow it up with one of the most effortlessly catchy pop songs in their entire catalog (their debut single “Virginia Plain”…and even that simple tune is made immeasurably better by both Ferry’s outsized personality and Eno’s superb additions) before ending the side with the marvelous bubbling keyboards of “2HB,” which Capn Marvel rightly calls a “fey New Wave-y track” (except not so much “fey” as “awesome!”) even though that style of music, you know, didn’t exist in 1972. Except it did! Because Roxy Music invented it.
Unlike side 1, which is interesting and unique while being catchy, well-constructed, and of unbelievably high quality, side 2 is interesting and unique without being good. The songs on side 1 kept jumping back and forth between styles and tempos, but always managed to make these shifts make sense in the greater context of the song and album. By contrast, the songs on side 2 keep jumping back and forth between styles and tempos while managing to make no sense whatsoever and sound like a band with no ability to condense its random, haphazard ideas into anything resembling a song (i.e. the complete opposite of the band we met on side 1). Part of the haphazardness is given away by the fact that the first song on side 2 is called “The Bob (Medley)” (subtitling a song “medley” is more or less the same thing as admitting “we couldn’t think of a way to make a real song out of this stuff, so we didn’t try”), but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. It shifts between rocking foreboding parts that aren’t foreboding and don’t rock and a happy bouncy section in the middle that could have possibly worked in any context other than the one it was placed in. “Chance Meeting” is three minutes of texture that does absolutely nothing. “Would You Believe?” is alright, thanks to a total boogie-rock part in the middle with Mackay blasting away like a pro on his sax, but the quiet ballad parts that start and end the song bring just about nothing to the table. “Sea Breezes” makes the “The Bob (Medley)” look like “If There is Something” in terms of tight construction and organization (and the bastards didn’t even have the common decency to subtitle it “medley!”). I like “Bitters End” because it’s basically a doo-wop rip and doesn’t try to be anything else (it even has “bup, bup, bup, bup, ba-dup…” backing vocals!), and is therefore the best song on side 2, but in the grand scheme of things it’s just cutesy and inoffensive and kinda fun. It pales before the groundbreaking rock goodness of side 1.
So, the best side of Roxy’s career, followed by the worst side they put out before their post-reunification brief suck period. I can’t overstate how enthralling side 1 is for someone with an appreciation for original, interesting, and a little off-kilter rock/pop music (I’ve still heard nothing else quite like it), but I also can’t overstate how much of a letdown side 2 is. Side 1 for 40 minutes would be a 10, no questions asked, but oh well. Roxy were never quite consistent enough on record to get a 10, but this is the most blatant example of it. Still, that fucking first side, man…
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
Personally, I think the Starostin cliche of some debut
albums managing to be more energetic and more exciting than what would follow
applies for the first half, and the other "debut albums" cliche of the band being too sloppy and not having a great
sense of quality control yet applies to the second.
The first half of this thing is not only easily the best side of music in the
Roxy catalog, but one of my favorites ever, an easy 10/10. I could spend ten
paragraphs praising every little detail of every one of these songs, but I'll
just shorten it and say that Re-make/Re-model is a fantastic fractured rocker
and probably one of the most stunning "opening songs" of a band's
career ever, Ladytron is a great ballad/rocker with
ultra-cool instrumental sections and one of the only appearances on this album
of the Ferry we'd all eventually come to know and love, Virginia Plain is an
effortlessly catchy blend of a perfect pop melody with a crazy treated Eno arrangement (I love Manzanera's
piercing guitar work on that one) and one of the first appearances of the
clever lyrical wordplay we'd all eventually come to know and love, and 2 H.B.
(which too often gets a "2 H.B. is good too, I guess, but then the second side
sucks" dismissal) is a lovely, warm piece of retro-futuristic lounge music
with an extremely memorable Casablanca-inspired chorus.
If There is Something is the obvious highlight though, my personal favorite
vocal performance of all time and one of my 10 or so favorite songs ever. The
ending, when Ferry keeps shouting "LIFT UUUUUPPP YOUR FEET AND PUT THEM ON
THE GROUND!" while the music swells up behind him (not to mention the
great "when you were young" back up vocals), is one of the most
transcendent moments in music for me.
The second half is the polar opposite, a band having too many ideas and being
unable to determine which ones are good or put them together coherently, while
Ferry's singing goes from just plain ugly (The Bob) to over-crooning to a
disgusting degree (Sea Breezes). I personally think the production on this half
is horribly thin and almost abrasive at times, which is why the very pretty
opening and closing of "Would You Believe?" is, for me, ruined by
that annoying as hell generic "boogie-rock" mid section.
...and finally, "Chance Meeting" is indeed non-existent, and "Bitter's End" is way too smug in it's cute ironic-ness for me to like it.
I probably couldn't even give it a 6/10 on it's own (on, the other hand, I
definitely wouldn't), but the first half alone earns it a strong 8/10.
For Your Pleasure (1973)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Do The
The weakest pre-“hiatus” Roxy studio album, but that doesn’t mean it’s, you know, bad or anything. Just not as exciting as its predecessor or the three that came after it. It’s also the last one featuring the contributions of Mr. Brian Eno, although those “contributions” are on the whole much less obvious than those on Roxy Music. On this one, it feels like Ferry’s really starting to dominate things, but not all the way, which is really what makes this the weakest of Roxy’s first five records. On the first, see, Ferry and Eno seemed like equal partners, and on the next three Ferry is let loose in all his glory. On this one, he’s not, but Eno’s not providing the same amount of interesting touches either. Plus all the 50’s/country/etc. influences are, except for “Grey Lagoons” I suppose, totally gone too, which is kinda silly when you consider the contrast of those 50’s/country/etc. influences with the Eno technotronics, i.e. the two things that I just got done saying aren’t here, was what made a lot of side one of the last album so fucking amazing.
So what do
we have, then? Well, a Roxy album that
actually sounds a lot closer to the two that came after it, but isn’t yet
showing the full complement of pop/rock magnificence that appears later on and
instead relies on “atmosphere.” Oh sure,
the opening rocker “Do the Strand” is one of their best ever songs and so
ever-lovingly weird I find it impossible to get enough of it, but that’s the
only song on here I’d grant “top-class Roxy status,” too. Outside of the pulsating “Editions of You,”
this album frustratingly avoids the rock, and much of it instead focuses on a
kind of dark, icy (yet thankfully still curiously odd and Roxy-ish), you know, “atmosphere.” The token track 2 ballad, “Beauty Queen,” for
instance, is based on a keyboard tone that just sounds cold. Sure, there’s a
semi-rocking break in the middle, but it’s done in like 15 seconds there before
the song’s main part comes back. Still,
even that one’s more or less a regular (if off-kilter in an early Roxy kind of
way) “ballad” at least, and a really good one at that. It’s the songs like “Strictly Confidential,”
“In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” and the closing title track that provide the
album’s general tone. They’re slow,
lilting, and, above all, you know, “atmospheric.” Thankfully, the creativity of Roxy at this
time was so strong they could mostly pull this stuff off, and all the three
tracks I just mentioned do work,
although I didn’t quite get “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” until I realized
it’s a dark, creepy, atmospheric dirge that’s actually love ballad to an
inflatable woman (and therefore fucking hilarious). The line “I blew up your body…but you blew my
mind” before the rock breakdown at the end (Hey! I forgot about that rock! I wish it didn’t fade-out/fade-in at the end,
though. That’s kinda
dumb.) is the album’s single best moment outside of the entirety of “Do the
See, my point is not that Roxy
couldn’t do this. They could. It’s just that they’re better when they write
straight-ahead yet off-kilter songs that feature Ferry being completely awesome
(I for one personally dig into “Grey Lagoons” and its
harmonica/piano/guitar-solo laden 50’s rock parts very much), and that quiet atmosphere can only take you so far
(which means, no, I don’t like “The Bogus Man,” the 9+ minute repetitive
pseudo-jam that does nothing besides occasionally have Andy Mackay play
off-key). And it’s here that I’d like to
return to the point about Eno’s relative
contribution. Again, I love the first
album (at least half of it) for the way that Ferry and Eno
worked together. The contrast between
the main theme/melody of something like “
theidiot7769@aim.com writes:
People seem to
rank this as either the worst of the first 6 or one of the best, and I'm
probably with the latter. I can perfectly understand why someone would take the
former position though, since while I personally love "The Bogus Man"
it's not like I could really defend it in any way to someone who
doesn't. The whole album has an ultra-cool dark, decadent (yeah, I know
everyone says that, but it's true) feel that makes it probably Roxy's most
cohesive album. I don't really agree with your "it's not Bryan's band
yet" point, since to me he's fully arrived and kicking ass all over this
album, but to each his own =)
Anyway, without making this as long as last time (sorry about
that, I have a pathological need to go song-by-song), "Do the Strand"
and "Editions of You" are fantastic neo-rockers, the former showing
Bryan Ferry firmly stepping into his "coolest man on the planet"
position and the latter just being amazingly fun and energetic. "In Every
Dream Home a Heartache" is just as genius as everyone says, and I've
personally NEVER been bored by the first part. Also, "Grey Lagoons"
is one of those songs everyone seems to bash for no reason; it's a nice breath
of lightweight doo-wop gospel boogie rock (with a harmonica solo).
"Strictly Confidential" is alright, probably one of the weaker songs
here; that falsetto hook doesn't work completely, but the other ballad
"Beauty Queen" has to be my favorite on the album and one of their
most underrated songs. It can pass you by the first 10 times you listen to it
(for me it did anyway), but it may be the most gorgeous crooning Ferry would
ever do, and those treated guitar (I think it's actually a guitar and not a
keyboard, but it's hard to tell with Roxy sometimes) sections are cool too.
I do find the closing title track to be sort of a mixed bag
though, and the only thing that keeps this album from a 10/10. The opening
is great (*drum roll* "for your pleasure in our present
state!") but I don't really see the point of Ferry's intentionally
odd singing or the song fading out for like half it's runtime.
9/10
Stranded (1973)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Mother Of
With Eno
gone and keyboard/electric violin virtuoso Eddie Jobson taking his place (thus
freeing Ferry from his keyboard duties live and letting him strut around in the
manner someone like Bryan Ferry should really be allowed to do), this album,
along with the two after it, are where Roxy stop being just an interesting and
unique combination of disparate influences, and instead become a Ferry-driven
unstoppable force of sleek, shiny European pop/rock and one of the coolest
bands ever to walk the face of the earth.
This album is where the “Roxy Music formula” firmly takes hold (at least
if you can call anything that produces something as gloriously schizophrenic as
“Amazona” a “formula”), but calling something a
“formula,” and pointing out certain “formulaic” features (the blistering
opening rocker, the soft, sensitive ballad that follows in the second slot, the
song early on side 2 where Bryan sings in a foreign language because he’s Bryan
Ferry and he can) doesn’t mean something is bad. This album and the two after it show a
supremely confident, immensely talented band, led by a completely unique and
charismatic frontman, at the top of its game. And really, what’s better than that?
If you’re me, the answer is
nothing that doesn’t involve the fairer sex, the Red Sox, or the US Men’s
National Soccer team (by the way, I’m a soccer nut and have been for years,
despite never mentioning it on this website until now; I’m the kind of guy who
watches online Sopcasts of U-20 World Cup games,
skips “American sport” playoff games to catch taped UEFA Cup matches with
Spanish play-by-play, and is ready and willing to have an intelligent, informed
discussion on the latest rumors from the European transfer market (For
instance, maybe one of my English readers can tell me, but how in god’s name is
Darren Bent worth more money than Thierry Henry? And will Rijkaard
actually have the balls to play Ronaldinho, Henry, Messi, and Eto’o together? And if this happens and I catch the game on GolTV, will I immediately cream myself?). I routinely woke up at 3:30am to watch the
2002 World Cup in Korea/Japan. I
actually catch myself calling the sport, you know, football every now and then (at least when the Patriots aren’t in
season). None of this means I hate
freedom or support terrorism, though.
That’s already been proven by my staunchly democratic voting record, and
my support for socialized medicine only proves it further, at least if you
believe Fox “News”). I’m also gonna echo the sentiments of other web reviewers and
emphasize, now that he has full control of everything with Eno
gone, just how well Bryan delivers
his vocals. This album and Siren have to be two of the greatest
vocal albums I’ve ever heard. He takes
mediocre songs and makes them good, good songs and makes them great, and great
songs and makes them transcendent. A
bunch of this material would be pretty fucking nice without Ferry, but there is
no way something like “Street Life,”
or “Just Like You,” or “Amazona,” or “Mother of
Pearl,” or “Song For Europe,” or really any
fucking song on this album would have the quality it does without Ferry’s
singing.
As an example, let’s look at “Just Like You,” one of the most “normal” and “generic” ballads Roxy wrote while they were still awesome. First of all, calling it “generic” is more than a bit harsh, as the tasteful piano, light drums, elegant chord changes, and nearly perfect guitar solo and other touches from Manzanera mean we’re dealing with a great song to begin with, but would it be as amazing as it is without Ferry’s lovelorn falsetto? “You see I know it sounds crazy, but what can I do? I’ve fallen head over heals over you…” In Ferry’s hands, lyrics like this are both beautiful and heartbreaking. He’s fucking brilliant. The opening “Street Life” rocks as good as any track Roxy’s ever done, but the way he literally growls some of the lyrics, like “the sidewalk papers gutter-press you down!” or “they can make you feel like you’re losing your mind!” is just breathtaking. The tempo never lets up, the arrangement is huge and thick and loud, and Mackay and Manzanera both toss in all sorts of goodies, but it’s still Ferry that makes the song. And what about “Amazona?” It’s an utterly unique entry in the catalog of an utterly unique band, and the way Thompson’s drums, Manzanera’s tight little riff, and Ferry’s freakishly charismatic near-speak-singing (“from Arizonaaaaaaa…to Eldoradoooooooo…”) mesh together in the intro is probably the best moment on the entire album for me. The heavenly falsetto section and utterly frigged-out space breakdown that follow recently led my music nut girlfriend to comment “There’s so much going on this in this song I don’t even know where to begin. You could write a thesis on this.” But it all works! And it even returns to the opening drums/vocals/riff at the end, albeit with the guitar tone frigged out to hell. And it’s still the Ferry vocals during the opening section that are the best part of the song.
My favorite
has to be “Mother of Pearl,” though. It
starts out as a regular Roxy rocker before (maybe a minute in) morphing
randomly into a slower piano-based pop tune that turns out to be the main
theme. The repeated “Oh Mother of Pearl,
I wouldn’t trade you for another girl!” I suppose functions as the chorus, but
it only comes in once or twice at a time and goes away in five seconds, so
there’s really no “verse-chorus-verse” contrast here at all. The genius of the song is how it keeps
building and subtly adding all these little layers, like an echoey
guitar line here, or an extra percussion layer there, etc., until the simple
piano pop tune we started with is this huge, thick, gallivanting masterpiece of
layered sound, and it’s all driven by these whacked-out Ferry lines like
“you’re high-brow holy, with lots of so melancholy shimmering!” and “serpentine
sleekness…was always my weakness!” and references to Zarathustra and
whatever. And there are all these random
touches like the kissy sounds when
The rest of
the album isn’t as strong as those four tunes, but it certainly holds up at
least decently. “Serenade” is another
thick, slick Roxy Euro-rocker, though without the unique touches of “Street
Life.” “Psalm” seems a little haphazard
and almost unarranged to me (odd indeed on this record) and certainly doesn’t
need to run for eight minutes, but Ferry’s pleading still drags it up by its
bootstraps and makes it decent. “A Song
for Europe” is plodding and notable for the fact that
Stranded really works well as a unit. The cool, sleek, European, Ferry-centric mood is consistently engaging and brings the disparate types of songs together under a great “Bryan Ferry is the best vocalist ever” umbrella. They’re still a little off, but the off-ness isn’t front and center like the first album. It’s there just enough to create a song like “Amazona” or make songs like “Street Life” and “Mother of Pearl” a little more interesting than they probably would normally be, but the pop hooks are really allowed to shine through here. Hell, “Just Like You” is a completely normal love ballad, and it’s one of the best songs! This is just a really, really good record. Plus the cover model is smoking hot this time.
Country Life (1974)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “If It
Takes All Night”
Unfortunately not smoking hot cover models (well, the one on the left is pretty good, but the one on the right frankly disturbs me), but nevertheless another very, very strong Roxy album, even if the number of chances it takes relative to what the band had already accomplished by this point is zero. They’re in a holding pattern this time, and while some have commented that this record is more “stripped down” than its predecessor, this (while technically correct) only really means that the band throws on fewer weird synth effects and sticks to more straightahead song structures (except for the one song with the psychotic backwards violin solo, ofcourse), which they’d been gradually doing on every album since Roxy Music anyway. It’s still really good, though, and probably the most consistent album they’d yet put out, which basically means this is the first Roxy album that doesn’t have an 8-minute long track that I don’t find interesting. No, see, the track or two I don’t find interesting on this one are short! Good times.
While I like to say that each Roxy
album is unique, Stranded and Country Life admittedly sound a lot like
each other, so if you like one, I can safely say you’ll like the other. The big, ass-kicking opener this time is “The
Thrill of it All,” which every review I read seems to pick out as one of the
two or three best Roxy songs ever and by far
the best song on the record, but I feel I must protest. The main reason I’m protesting is there’s a
bunch of tunes on this one I fucking love that other web reviewers seem to
brush past (but Capn Marvel loves this album as much
as I do! I’m telling you, sarcastic
dicks are always right), but it’s also because I don’t find “The Thrill of it
All” obviously better than, say, “Do the
Anyway, the track 2 ballad this time is the gentle “Three and Nine,” which is one of those songs where you don’t realize how good it is until about the tenth time you hear it, but eventually the multi-tracked Bryan whisper-falsettos, oboe and harmonica parts, and ultra-quiet little keyboard touches make you realize “hey, this song fucking rules!” It just seeps into you, it’s so quiet and unpretentious and barely even there, especially surrounded by all the mammoth loud rock on side 1, including but not limited to “All I Want is You” (like “Serenade” from Stranded, aptly described as “a generic Roxy Music rocker,” but it is freaking loud) and the fascinatingly awesome “Out of the Blue,” which is always the song that makes me go “really?” when people describe this album as “stripped down.” A vaguely psychedelic keyboard and string-happy rocker with big swooshing noises and multiple Andy Mackay oboe solos? And then there are those big, triumphant “And out of the blue, love came rushing in!” breaks and Eddie Jobson’s frantic, minute-long, backwards electric violin solo at the end (which is amazing and certainly the best single moment on the record). How, pray tell, is this song “stripped down” in any way? It’s just as elaborate as “Amazona” and “Mother of Pearl,” easily. It’s also nearly as good as those two. This band rules.
Elsewhere, Bryan polishes off his German for the creepy polka-march section of “Bitter Sweet” (the token song where Bryan sings in a foreign language early on side 2) and the band tries their hand at what sounds like a medieval harpsichord ballad (“Triptych”), both of which work quite well, although not to the point where I’ll be using any exclamation points. “Casanova” makes two “generic Roxy rockers,” but unfortunately this song (despite the fonky clavinet) I find annoyingly mediocre. There’s always one per album that doesn’t quite work, you know? Instead, give me the gorgeous piano ballad “A Really Good Time” or the uber-melodic closing rocker “Prairie Rose,” which shows me the band is finally realizing their albums might work better if they end on a high note instead of a 6-minute piece of moody atmosphere. Don’t get me wrong, Roxy can do moody atmosphere, but this is pop-rock band (albeit a totally unique one), and one of the highest order. Give me a closing pop-rock song with catchy melodies and interesting guitar work, guys. As “Prairie Rose” shows, they had it in them all along.
Finally,
“The Thrill of it All” and “Out of the Blue” certainly, and “Three and Nine,”
“A Really Good Time,” and “Prairie Rose” probably as well, may be considered
better songs than my favorite on a purely “objective” basis, but music is not
objective (if it were, no one would ever buy a Limp Bizkit
album), which is why I absolutely love the shit out of the country-shuffle
throwaway “If it Takes All Night.”
So, this is another top-notch Roxy Music album that covers an impressive number of styles and moods, displays excellent musicianship and wonderful singing, is over in a tidy 40+ minutes, and has a song or two that aren’t that hot thrown in for, I dunno, variety? Of the three great records post-Eno and pre-“hiatus”, this is the least “unified” one, but that isn’t really a problem. Just sit back and witness how these guys can go directly from a futuristic backwards violin solo on LSD to the country awesomeness of “If it Takes All Night” in one step. What a band.
Siren (1975)
Rating: 9
Best Song: “End Of
The Line”
Yes, that’s Jerry Hall (who inspired “Prairie Rose” on Country Life, you know) on the cover in all her mid-70’s Jerry Hall hotness before she left Bryan for Mick Jagger (and in fairness to Bryan, in the mid-70’s I think Mick Jagger might have been the only musician who could have possibly constituted an upgrade from the fabulous Mr. Ferry. Well done, Jerry), and yes, the last Roxy record from their golden period is the simplest, least weird, most commercial, least dense, and most straightforward of the bunch. It’s also the best, and one of the best examples of perfectly executed, thematically unified, emotionally resonant, and well-written pop-rock music you’ll likely be able to find. Except “Could it Happen to Me?” because that song’s kinda dumb and not so exciting. Which sucks because otherwise I’d totally break out the 10 for this album. Damn Roxy Music and their tendency for one song per album to be distinctly mediocre…
Every album since their debut has seen Roxy Music moving ever so slowly away from weirdness and artsiness and towards straightforward, emotional pop-rock (even Country Life, despite its sounding just like Stranded, since it’s not like anything as weird as “Amazona” was on there), and on Siren their transformation from the semi-avant garde weirdos in the picture at the top of this page to Bryan Ferry’s merry band of ultra-cool suave sophisticates is complete. And while again Ferry is the driving force behind the whole deal, I’d like to take issue with some reviews of this record I’ve seen that actually give him too much credit, as if to say “Roxy’s lost their artsy spirit and written a bunch of general proto-disco-rock, and what makes this album really good instead of just kinda sorta OK is Bryan’s fantastic vocals and nothing else.” This, my friends, is complete bullshit. The songwriting on this album, while commercial and not “artsy” in the least bar possibly the quiet, moody opening section of “Sentimental Fool,” is not only at least as good as every other Roxy album to this point, but I think it’s better. There, I said it. Maybe it doesn’t have as many amazing uber-wonder songs of your “Street Life” or “Mother of Pearl” or “The Thrill of it All” variety, but I can safely say every song here (except, again, “Could it Happen to Me?”) provides something melodic, interesting, unique, tasteful, etc. It’s also the most unified album of their career, and in this respect it’s not even close. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “concept album,” but every song contains themes of longing, lost love, painful breakups, etc. Capn Marvel called this “Bryan’s Lost Weekend concept album,” and (again, outside of the term “concept album”) that’s exactly what it is, as our lovelorn narrator takes us on a broken-hearted tour of singles bars, nighttime streets, and lost relationships. And let me ask you, is there anyone you’d rather have leading you on such a journey than Bryan Ferry?
The “big
opening rock splooge” this time, “Love is the Drug,”
is instead more in the “stylish, disco-rock” vein (I have also seen this album
called “disco-rock” numerous times, which unfortunately describes only “Love is
the Drug” and “Both Ends Burning” and is an entirely inadequate
characterization for the other seven songs on the album), but it’s fantastic
anyway, from the opening sounds of footsteps and a car engine starting up
(surely a douchetastic bright red sports car of some
sort; if Bryan Ferry drives a kind of car other than this, I’d be severely
disappointed) to the absolutely ace,
freakishly danceable bass line and Bryan’s telling us how he’s gonna “troll downtown to the red light place” because “love
is the drug and I need to score.” The
saxophone blasts are perfect here, and you can literally picture
I’m
probably alone in this, but the token track 2 ballad on this album, “End of the
Line,” might be my favorite Roxy song, period.
No one can do “heartbroken” like Bryan Ferry, and this is certainly
Roxy’s best “heartbroken, post-breakup” song, plus it’s an uber-tasteful
and wonderfully produced country/western ballad! How awesome is that? It slowly, almost longingly lopes along as
Until you get to the end nothing quite matches up to those two masterpieces, but the uniformity in tone and lyrical theme is still something to behold, especially when combined with the admirable and frankly surprising diversity of style this “disco-rock album” provides you with. “Sentimental Fool” I already mentioned, but I haven’t fully delved into how cool it is to hear this moody, barely there opening slowly crescendo into the main, supremely melodic main section (“I’ve seen what love can do, but I don’t regret it!”) that’s again helped immensely by perfectly-timed Andy Mackay sax stabs (the secret of a good rock band saxophone player is to know that, 80% of the time, your presence is not welcome, and, following that, to know the right moments to come in and the right little lines to play when you do; for an example of how to do this perfectly, see this album; for an example of how to not play the saxophone in a rock band, see any rock album with David Sanborn on it) before getting all moody again and fading out. So well done. And what about the ultra-distorted, super-fast Manzanera guitar abuse at the start of “Whirlwind?” That’s probably the most violent guitar sound on any Roxy album ever. And what about the fantastic, tight piano pop of “She Sells?” No that is some good stuff. Sure, “Whirlwind” kind of loses its steam and turns into an A- level regular Roxy rocker and “She Sells” has the odd honky keyboard section in the middle, but does that make Manzanera’s guitar part in the former or the sickeningly catchy main melody in the latter any less awesome and new for the band? No. It just means that, along with the annoying “eh” qualities of “Could it Happen to Me?” (a relatively bland if inoffensive ballad with decent keyboard pop sections thrown in), I can’t give a 10 to this band even though I find myself praising them so damn much and again and again lamenting how I can’t give them a 10. Blargh.
The
powerful disco-rocker (like I mentioned before, this one actually is) “Both
Ends Burning” is a lot of people’s favorite here, but, undoubtedly good tune
though it is (witness Ferry’s vocal chord straining “Both ends burning…TIL THE
EEEEEEEENNNND!!!!” delivery; the man is really,
really good at what he does), I prefer the relatively subdued “Nightingale”
that follows it and begins the less desperate, more optimistic conclusion to
the album that’s finished off by the superb and absolutely perfect in context “Just Another High.” Musically, it might be the simplest song
here, consisting of not much more (until the breathtaking last minute or two)
than drums, bass, piano, and that high-pitched keyboard sound that dominates so
much of the album. The melody and lyrics
are a wonderful and fitting way to end the record, though. “I’m just another crazy guy. Playing at love was another high.” It’s a self-defeating yet strangely uplifting
realization for the narrator that sums up the lyrical themes of the album so
well it’s like tying them up with a little bow.
The subtle layers the band adds (like the “ooooooooo”
backup vocals and quiet backing guitar tracks) again show their mastery of
dynamics, and
Though it
might not give you the best idea of what Roxy’s catalog is like due to its
relatively unusual (for them) pop-rock straightforwardness, I’d still recommend
this as the first purchase for a Roxy virgin.
There’s no perfect Roxy album, and, as I keep mentioning, each one has a
song or two that prevent it from being placed on a pedestal with something like
Sgt. Pepper’s or Blonde on Blonde. Roxy have
nothing approaching an album like that in their catalog. But, at least for their main creative period,
they were a remarkably consistent
band with all sorts of wonderful individual moments on each of their albums,
and if the fucking Eagles or the Steve fucking Miller Band can have the
profiles they have in the US, there’s no excuse for Roxy’s not getting their
due in this country outside of critical circles. Like I said in the intro,
nator9999@comcast.net writes:
No! Nightingale and Just
Another High are NOT the most optimistic songs on the record! They are, in fact,
two of the saddest. Admittedly, this may not be apparent if you are not aware
of the imaginary narrative I have constructed for this album, so I'll share my
interpretation with you:
Love is the Drug: This one is pretty transparent. The protagonist, Bryan, is
being his suave self, going out to the disco and bringing back random nameless
babes for a night of debauchery.
End of the Line: But then, poof! The dream dissolves and
Sentimental Fool:
Whirlwind:
She Sells: One girl at the party catches
Could it Happen to Me?:
Both Ends Burning: Sex. Not much to say about this one either. (If you don't
follow my reasoning, the two "ends" alluded to in the song title are
the two people at opposite ends of
Nightingale: The awkward morning after. They both wake up, and his elusive
love-interest flies away like a nightingale, not to be heard from again. (I
don't know, it's metaphorical or something. It's not my fault Ferry's lyrics
sound so cheesy out of context.)
Just Another High: After many failed attempts to contact her again,
romantic love is a sad but invigorating practice in futility. I guess it's not
wrist-slittingly sad, but "uplifting" isn't
what I'd use to describe it either.
So, as you can see from my brilliant and henceforth canonical interpretation of
this album, the last two songs are actually pretty sad, in Roxy's typically
bittersweet sort of way. Also, this makes "Could It Happen to Me?"
marginally less bland, since it's one of the most important songs thematically,
if not musically. Sorry I wrote so much to make this relatively simple point;
my summer job is insanely boring.
p.s. I think it's awesome that you had the audacity to claim "If It Takes
All Night" as the best song on Country Life! Good job.
Also, is it weird that the only Roxy Music cover model that I find remotely
attractive is painted blue and has fins? Am I alone on this one?
Viva! (1976)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Do The
Live album released early in the
four-year period in which Roxy didn’t record anything culled from a bunch of
shows over three years, this is notable for how much and how unexpectedly a
sleek, stylish studio band like Roxy can bring the rock hard live, but other than the fact that this will kick your ass
farther than any Roxy studio album, there’s nothing too essential about
it. I for one wish they hadn’t picked three songs out of the eight from For Your Pleasure (though, admittedly,
one is “Do the
Moving on,
the 3rd For Your Pleasure
track is “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” and the appearance of “Chance
Meeting” from way back on the debut as well means the band has randomly decided
to stress their atmospheric side on this live album instead of filling it with
“Street Life” and “The Thrill of it All.”
Well, then. For the most part,
the driving rock of the live band makes these “atmospheric tracks” interesting
in spite of themselves, though it’s still impossible to make “Chance Meeting”
anything other than “nonexistent.” “Both
Ends Burning” is great (in spite of the female backup singers whose presence I
utterly detest because, you know, Bryan
Ferry has no need for female backup singers), and I also appreciate the
ten-minute “If There is Something” that totally owns my ass, but the absolutely
butt-ripping versions of “Out of the Blue” and “Do the Strand” are where this
thing makes its money and earns the high rating of which I have deemed it
worthy. The violin solo in “Out of the
Blue” doesn’t sound any worse here, and in fact it sounds better when placed on
top of the relentless hard rock machine that is live Roxy, and the live version
of “Do the
So yes, good live album here, great playing, but the song selection could have been a little better. It doesn’t get the nod over any of the band’s studio records (to this point, at least), but it’s a really good album nonetheless. And it totally rocks, man, so dig that.
Manifesto (1979)
Rating: 5
Best Song: “Still
Falls The Rain”
Roxy reconvene without Eddie Jobson as a hollow and disappointingly generic shell of their former selves. Still (and not that it’s good or anything), I don’t think I find this album as bad as most tend to (I suppose Capn Marvel gives it roughly the same rating I have, but if you read his review he still slices it apart pretty brutally). I’ve also seen it called a “disco” record in a bunch of places, but unless I don’t know what disco sounds like (not out of the question), I don’t really see that either. It seems like people want to call Roxy “disco” all the time (like they did with Siren, which had two disco-esque songs surrounded by a sea of relatively standard (and awesome!) pop-rock) because they’re image-conscious, “decadent” Europeans and Bryan Ferry was such a club-hopping fiend. They have dance-type beats, it’s the late seventies, Bryan Ferry is Bryan Ferry…so it’s disco! No. A beat here or there (the drum part in “Angel Eyes” is total disco, for instance), maybe a string part or two, but for the most part this is just unfortunately generic, occasionally sloppy, and frankly silly pop-Euro-dance tripe. Just because they have no soul anymore doesn’t mean they sold it to disco.
I split this record up about evenly between somewhat embarrassing generic dancey material and slightly less embarrassing yet worse non-dancey material, all of which I’d describe as totally normal 1979-era pop music with occasional disco trappings (and not, you know, disco music). Hell, I swear my enjoyment the more upbeat (and consequently more embarrassing) stuff on the record is partially due to the Tormato Corollary, but I think a record has to obtain a rating of at least 7 to be “good specifically because it sucks.” 5 is not “good,” although for some reason I do enjoy, at least a little bit, each of the first four tracks on this album. The title track, for instance, actually does absolutely nothing (and this time I actually mean that; it starts out really slow and moody like it’s gonna crescendo into something cool, but it never actually crescendos and ends up doing the same dumb thing for three minutes before Bryan sings a line) outside of sounding like a ripoff of the more generic-sounding disco-ey rock tracks on Pink Floyd’s The Wall (and no, Roxy Music has never sounded remotely like that before, which considering how boring they make this sound must retroactively be counted a good quality of theirs). Hell, though…it doesn’t sound too awful, and Bryan provides possibly the only vocal performance on the record that doesn’t completely suck when compared to his past triumphs (no, this one just sucks without the intensifying adverb), so it’s not all bad. “Trash” is a two-minute pop song that probably took about as long to write, but it’s silly, so why not. “Angel Eyes” is total ridiculous disco-dance trash (with fake snapping fingers and random sax blasts that do nothing interesting! I guess Andy Mackay sucks on this album, too!), but it’s strangely entertaining in a fun yet retarded way, which is also how I’d describe what I’m nominating as best track, “Still Falls the Rain.” Witness the brilliant lyrics in this one: “Hey brother don't be square. Here it is, not over there. I'm your man - I've got it made. You need my fire, you need my shade.” Poetry! Or not. The song is silly, dippy fun though, with its bongos and totally generic silly sax blasts. Ferry is charismatic yet moronic instead of charismatic yet the coolest man on earth, but I dunno, it’s catchy. I told you, I get a decent amount of dumb enjoyment out of the first part of this record. Is that so wrong?
The rest of it kind of drifts by in an annoyingly generic (and, again, oddly sloppy) Euro-dance kind of way that’s not patently offensive but not good either. “Ain’t That So” has this odd faux-Hendrix (seriously!) scratchy funk guitar opening but quickly degenerates into lifeless keyboard pop nothingness (sadly, that’s by far the most interesting guitar tidbit here…I guess Phil Manzanera sucks on this album, too!). A lot of these songs, like “My Little Girl” and “Dance Away”…they’re not patently offensive, and they display at least a modicum of life (unlike, say, Roxy’s next album), but they’re just unexciting music. “Stronger Through the Years” is six minutes long and I can’t tell you a single thing about it. I dunno, I guess “Cry, Cry, Cry” is oddly entertaining in its wanna-be bouncy pop with horn sections and female backup choruses self, but is the swooshing section near the end really all that necessary?
I get just enough perverse enjoyment out of just enough of this record to render it not a total loss, and it’s actually well short of the album that comes after it in terms of boringness and facelessness, but the fact remains that this is just not good music. Ferry sounds like a thousand other singers, Mackay, Manzanera and Thompson sound like mediocre session musicians, and the whole thing just smacks of laziness and lack of effort. I can’t even tell if they wanted it to be a disco record or not, it’s so unconvincing (and if they wanted it to be, as I talked about before, they failed). Still, I don’t think it’s as awful as others seem to maintain. That doesn’t mean I’d recommend its purchase, though.
Flesh + Blood (1980)
Rating: 4
Best Song: “Oh Yeah”
Although this is one probably slightly better than Manifesto on a purely objective, “How stupid is it and how much does it fuck up?” basis, it also makes Manifesto look like Stranded in terms of how much fun and personality it has, so that’s a problem. No, Flesh + Blood isn’t a semi-ridiculous piece of Euro-dance trash like its predecessor, but it’s also faceless, lifeless, and as sterile as the perfect Aryan specimen “models” that grace its cover. There is little (if any) disco or anything resembling disco on this record. Instead, this is “mature,” ultra-generic synth-pop with as much soul as Michael Bolton and as much personality as Tiger Woods. This is not obviously bad music in any way, but it nevertheless is bad for the simple reason that it is incredibly, almost hideously boring and lacking in spark. Maybe Manifesto is easier to make fun of because it actually sucks (even though I don’t hate it), but no band featuring Bryan Ferry as its lead singer should have as little personality and charisma as the neutered Phil Manzanera, absent Andy Mackay, and probably endless cabal of session musicians (no Paul Thompson anymore!) that calls itself “Roxy Music” on this shitpile. Ugh.
There is
one good song. When an album consists of
nothing but ultra-professionally produced adult contemporary synth-based music (Screw it, I’m not even gonna call this “pop” anymore; “pop” implies that something
has a pulse; this is adult fucking
contemporary music), if by chance someone actually comes up with a pretty
pop-type hook for one of the songs and the adult contemporary schlock keyboards
are layered just right, you may actually come out with something enjoyable, and
that’s what we have with “Oh Yeah.” I
find it distinctly ridiculous how an album with neither rhythm nor a
discernable guitar presence can seriously produce the chorus “There’s a band
playing on the radio with a rhythm of rhyming guitars,” but you know what? It’s a hook,
and it’s a hook that’s undoubtedly better than any of the “hooks” found on Manifesto, even if it’s produced so as
not to offend the cast of The Big Chill. Even
That’s all we have, though. Much of the rest of the record sounds exactly like “Oh Yeah,” only without the great hook, which therefore makes it worthless if admittedly not obviously horrendous and offensive to the listener. “Same Old Scene” has faint echoes of a disco beat (but not too strong! Don’t want to scare any upper-class white people off with “dance” music!), and the title track has a “serious” distorted guitar part that consists of Manzanera’s playing two chords while he’s asleep. “Rain, Rain, Rain” attempts to funky…maybe. You know, I can’t even tell. Pathetic. The band also covers both “In the Midnight Our” and “Eight Miles High” here for some reason, and makes them sound so much like the rest of the album you might not even recognize that they’re covers. “Eight Miles High” in particular is just butchered. I don’t even wanna talk about it. Let’s just move on.
Don’t buy this album. Compared to some of the mid-late eighties dregs that people like Bob Dylan and David Bowie foisted on the general public it sounds like Mozart, and in that sense I suppose it’s admirable that Roxy’s nadir is this boring, faceless, but ultimately inoffensive thing as opposed to Knocked out Loaded or Tonight (god, that album is insipid). Really, the only thing that makes this album offensive to me is that it’s so annoyingly inoffensive. Still, I mean…this is supposed to be Roxy Music? It’s so vanilla. It’s so whitebread. It’s all the clichés that Roxy Music’s great albums in the early-mid seventies steadfastly avoided being. It’s depressing. Don’t buy this album.
Avalon (1982)
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Avalon”
More or less the same thing as Flesh + Blood, but produced better and
with better songs. It’s probably about
as good as incredibly sedate, adult contemporary synth-type
music can hope to be, and as such I guess it’s pretty neat that Ferry and co.
have mastered a type of music about as far removed from their traditional
awesome Euro-rock stew as possible in such a short span of time. However, this type of music they’ve mastered is adult contemporary easy listening
relaxed keyboard pop schlock bullshit, so let’s not start sucking each other’s
dicks just yet. This was also their
biggest hit in the
Just like Flesh + Blood, the music here consists of drums that may or may not be computerized (I can’t tell), layers of soft, unthreatening keyboards, occasional tasteful and unobtrusive Phil Manzanera guitar runs, and an occasional Andy Mackay sax part (to remind everyone he’s still in the band) that glides by without your noticing. Everything is smoothed over even past the point of being neutered (it’s actually less exciting than Flesh + Blood, if that’s even possible). For some reason, though, the production this time lets the layers of soft adult keyboards breathe just enough to make them generally pretty to the ear, and, as should be expected, Bryan Ferry and his pretty, acceptable-to middle-aged-toolbags-who-listen-to-Barbra-Streisand voice is easily the dominant instrument in the mix. Some of the songs, like “More Than This” and “Turn You On,” are just gorgeous adult pop songs, ten times more relaxed than anything on Flesh + Blood but also eons more melodic than anything that album had. The title track here is my favorite, as it’s the one song where the subtle, layered, smoothed-over prettiness hits you on anything near the level of Roxy’s best stuff from the past. Just a wonderful melody here, the female backup singers on the chorus actually help the song, and that guitar sound that sounds like a slide guitar echoing in the distance is just superb. Sure, this album is a soundtrack for 50-somethings walking along a beach discussing their retirement accounts and drinking a bottle of Chardonnay, but good songs are still good songs.
This album fails, oddly enough, the handful of times it tries to have a pulse. The wannabe-maybe-“rock” “The Main Thing” is mediocre, and the token stab at a dance track, “The Space Between,” is just horrendous. “While My Heart is Still Beating” is the only song that doesn’t sound exactly like “More Than This” or the title track that I enjoy, and even that one isn’t all that removed from the aural equivalent of pretty-sounding Valium that takes up most of the record. “Take a Chance With Me” I suppose actually has a steady beat and keyboards that rise above soporific, but it’s still a super-relaxed pop song (and a good one at that…Manzanera again chips in with a couple great pseudo-country guitar bits). “True to Life” is nothing but atmosphere and sounds like the soundtrack to a scene from Miami Vice with Don Johnson riding on a yacht and looking out at the ocean in a relaxed fashion (and hell, maybe it was). There are also two short instrumentals that never shot anyone’s dog.
This album is pretty, and, at a brisk 37 minutes, it’s also very compact and does not overstay its welcome. It has good melodies, lovely production, and Manzanera, despite barely playing anything, still gives his best work since Roxy Music was last good. Still, everything sounds the same and is designed to put you to sleep, and the two or three times it has any energy it blows. This must be factored in, as must the fact that Roxy is no closer to regaining their awesomeness than they were on Manifesto or Flesh + Blood. They’ve just managed to come up with a better and more finely produced set of songs to mask that lack of awesomeness. For what it is, it’s aces, but when “what it is” is so inherently inferior to what Roxy Music used to be, you can’t help but compare. It’s nice to see Roxy was capable of making something good so long after Siren, but you still need all the first five albums well before this one. Once you have a wine cellar, you can go ahead and pick up Avalon.