Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

roxy rules

There's something very sexy about Roxy Music. Maybe it's the way the lead singer has that special appeal towards the ladies when he sings, or maybe it's just the beautiful models on the album covers. Whatever it is, I really think this band took glam rock to a new level of seriousness.

These songs are just, well, downright sexy to listen to. Highly enjoyable vocal melodies, yeah, and instrumentally pleasing and technically a very talented band, but For Your Pleasure also contains very good songwriting to elevate most of these songs to greatness. I don't think they're as good as David Bowie, but then again, Bowie and Roxy Music are very different beasts.

"In Every Dream Home a Heartache" kind of stinks though, because it's just one moody vocal melody with strange lyrics that repeat over and over, and nothing really memorable happens the entire 5 and a half minutes. The title song RULES a lot! It starts off fairly normally, with a typical Roxy Music-like vocal melody we've come to expect from the band, and then drifts into this very hazy and bizarre atmospheric jam with piano and cool drums, and it's just... very VERY strange. I love it though.

I recommend this album. November 16, 2008

One of the best.

I find that this is one of there best albums great cover and great music. October 28, 2008

The End Of Eno?

This album signaled the end of the Eno era for Roxy Music. It was apparent that Eno wanted Roxy to remain quirky and obscure. Ferry had other plans. This album also ends the Bryan Ferry's stranglehold on the songwriting aspect of the group. The subsequent releases from Roxy would have more input from Phil Manzanera and Andy MacKay and even one song written with Eno's replacement Eddie Jobson on the 1975 release Siren. Onto the tracks of this glorious sophmore effort from a great band.

The album opens with the great dance track " Do The Strand ". This song reminds me of those great rock songs of the 50's and 60's . An homage if you will to Chubby Checker or maybe even Sly Stone. Then we have the exquisite " Beauty Queen " a song for my part that has to do with a breakup between a guy and the ultimate woman. Then the third track seems to be a suicide note of sorts with the song " Strictly Confidential ". " Editions of You" is a modest rocker similar to the " Strand " in tempo. The masterpiece of this album is " In Every Dream Home A Heartache " , a song about a blow up doll. Can't get any stranger than that subject. The next track is the scary " Bogus Man " seems like an ode to Jack the Ripper to me. One of my personal favorites is the seventh track " Grey Lagoons" with it 50's style piano playing by Ferry himself. The final track is the title track " For Your Pleasure" which is probably one of the best examples of Brian Eno at work. The experimentation on this album is amazing. As of this writing it is understood that the core 5 members of Roxy Music are in the studio now finishing up their long and eagerly awaited follow up to their last studio album Avalon. Brian Eno has contributed some material and was working in the studio with the other members 2 years ago. As a huge fan of this group I hope that Brian Eno will join the Ferry, Manzanera, MacKay and Thompson on a new tour. It would be nice to see the original line- up on stage. August 8, 2008

A Roxy fan, but not of this music

I do like Roxy Music at their best or even at something that resembles their best, but I have to say that this CD does nothing for me. I gave it a fair chance and I usually hold on to CDs that I believe will grow on me, but even if the FBI repeatedly played this for me if I was in Waco, I can't say that it would grow on me. June 15, 2008

Now Playing! Four Your Pleasure Quote Unquote

Roxy Music from 1972 through 1975 or so was a fascinating and deeply important band that was bursting with so much talent that implosion seemed inevitable. Band members either left (Eno), became slowly marginalized (Andy Mackay, Phil Manzanera), or were fired (Paul Thompson), so that primary songwriter/vocalist Bryan Ferry could streamline (and eventually dilute) his concept without any bothersome dissent. But back in those heady early days it was Roxy (along with The New York Dolls) that seemed to be the first important bands not just formed in the new decade, but truly OF the 1970s, however obviously influenced and by high and popular cultural movemts from romantic poetry to Surf music they may have been. From the start, with a name that deliberately evoked the cinematic, the group's immersion in everything from Dirk Bogarde to Humphrey Bogart, Hollywood and the visual arts (Francis Bacon to fashion magazines); the music was richly allusive, yet strikingly original from their seminal debut, and one hears strains Cuban, doo-wop, Brecht/Weil, Harry Partch, The Velvet Underground, and Stockhausen, to name a random few.
Roxy took the Stones' rejection of the 'sincere' everyman personae rock and pop stars, from Dylan to Elvis and Johnny Rotten, had been most comfortable with to a more perverse conclusion. Ferry was fascinated with irony, distance, surfaces, and the band's music was both edgy and glossy, infectious and cutting edge, but unlike most bands comning out of the early '70s they were no no more steeped in blues than Fred Asdtaire; and they surely emphasized Astaire if only because that kind of style was such an anomaly in rock and roll at the time.
"Roxy Music", their 1972 debut, may be richer and more allusive, but the band had a better grasp on making records - and a real producer in Chris Thomas - by "For Your Pleasure" which may be, along with 1974's "Stranded", their greatest achievement. Back then everything from the font used on the cover to the black-on-black artwork to the band photos inside the gatefold were deliberate, a little fruity, fresh, and unsettling (and often dismissed, especially in the US where the Doobie Bros dominated the radio telling us to 'Listen to the Music' and Loggins & Messina seemed no more frisky than Jim Croce singing 'Your Mama Can't Dance (and Your Daddy Won't Rock 'n' Roll).' Roxy - both more intellectual and more unabashedly 'pop' - were far less accessable in those days, before the likes of Duran Duran and other 'new romantics' smoothed out Roxy's rough edges and dominated the '80s. Roxy seemed both populist and elitist, but were really neither.
Every song here is essential, and the album is brilliantly sequenced. There were no singles excerpted, but side one kicks off the closest thing to a hit: Ferry, affects fey, lounge-lizard persona, utterly lacking in innocence or youth. Yet somehow he steals the Malt Shop Talent Show by lathering the room with his vibrato and stiff-limbed (as I imagined, two years before seeing the band live) demonstrations of dance crazes of yore, from the waltz to the mashed potato to the watusi; rejecting all as passe, the singer implores us to "Do The Strand"; the band rocks out convincingly, in their deliberately robotic yet funky way.
Ferry's piano seems as jittery as his vocals, even on the slow ones like the carefully written melodramas 'Strictly Confidential' and 'Beauty Queen', and the side's climactic ode to artifice, 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache,' a more menacing piece of music than the Doors ever recorded. Eno's tape manipulations created textures that are essential to the sound of this album, and even if he wrote no songs for ther band - to it's detriment, for I can hear the band romping through 'Cindy Tells Me' or 'Needles In The Camel's Eye' along with 'EWditions Of You' - he was Ferry's perfect foil; Manzanera and Mackay are both self-effacing yet highly sophisticated musicians, essential to the band's image and sonic identity, adding grit and futuristic soul throughout. The long cuts on side two are as hypnotic as they're intended to be. If Ferry peaked as a lyricist on "Stranded", Roxy Music, meaning the original band with a collective vision based on Ferry's masterplan, never came close to the grand heights achieved on "For Your Pleasure." May 7, 2008

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