Roxy Music’s staggering canon gets the deluxe vinyl treatment
The half-speed mastering and the lovely packaging of its original sleeves—these are but bonus features when it comes to the luster of Roxy Music. What matters is that eight studio albums (its eponymous first LP, For Your Pleasure, Stranded, Country Life, Siren, Manifesto, Flesh + Blood and Avalon) of avant-garde ’70s pop turned’80s lizard lounge mood music find its way into the greater dialogue. Especially in the U.S., where Roxy is known for the disco-era “Love Is The Drug.” With its membership (thankfully) above the grass, and with no tribute albums or awards recorded or gifted, the band’s immense impact is often blurred.
As a part of glam’s first gleaming, Roxy is historically the weird cousin of David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Consider, though, the complete picture: an art-school ensemble with a tall warbling crooner who looked and sounded like an astronaut Elvis (Bryan Ferry); a synthesizer/treatments manipulator who resembled Riff Raff from Rocky Horror Picture Show (the singularly named Eno); a greaser playing an oboe (Andy Mackay); no steady bass player. Add needling guitarist Phil Manzanera and pummeling drummer Paul Thompson, and that’s your Roxy lot, with neo-doo-wop avant-rock.
Yet, fill its rich, warmly produced sound with wildly catchy melodies—some driving, such as “Do The Strand” and “Virginia Plain”; some crepuscular and somber as “In Every Dream Home A Heartache” and “Mother Of Pearl”—and a larger picture emerges. Add Ferry’s coolly passionate tales of romance (“Both Ends Burning”), sex (“Casanova”) or downright sinister weirdness (“The Bogus Man”), and before 1980, Roxy Music was unstoppable. After a brief break in the mid-’70s, Roxy remodeled itself as a streamlined, atmospheric soft-disco ensemble free from the crinkles of discordant noise, wonky breaks and Eno-isms, and still theirs was a magnificent obsession.
—A.D. Amorosi
