Roxy Music

Black cover, a neon-lit, nocturnal Los Angeles cityscape as backdrop. A statuesque Amanda Lear, all plastic poses, holds a panther on a leash. Driver Ferry looks on amused in the background, leaning against the door of a Lincoln Continental. Inside the album sleeve: the five showmen of the new glittering rock, from left to right Eno, Manzanera, Ferry, Mackay and Thompson, eccentrically decked out, each clutching a guitar, striking every pose an Elvis Presley might have made his own, had he played in front of an audience of Martians. The artistic recipe of Roxy Music can be summed up in these few portraits: a meticulous recovery of the key moments of rock and roll, reviewed from its first cries in the '50s, through the art-rock school of the '60s, flirting with contemporary glam, and finally launched with disconcerting ease toward the future. "For Your Pleasure" is the fruit of all these elements combined, ingredients blended so skillfully that they make for a living, dynamic record, pulsing to such a degree that even today it sounds extraordinarily current.

Let's take a step back: the artistic trajectory of Roxy Music has its dazzling beginning in the summer of 1972, with the single "Virginia Plain", which in barely three minutes pushes the clock of rock's avant-garde forward by five years, thanks to its irresistible cocktail of experimentation and accessibility, traits that would become the hallmark of many new wave projects in the years to come. It's impossible not to mention this single, as well as the self-titled debut album, which has little to envy in "For Your Pleasure": where the latter is the result of an organic, self-aware project, "Roxy Music" is the explosive, disorderly detonation of all those intuitions that would forever place Bryan Ferry's band among rock royalty.

The saga of this (semi-tragic) delight begins with "Do The Strand", a staggering, brazen ride of sinuous vocal lines built over a breathless rhythm and unexpected breaks, into which Andy MacKay's sax interjections burn their mark, branding this track with a punk attitude ante litteram: the result is so effective that the song has become one of the band's live warhorses in every concert since.

The distinctive trait of early Roxy Music lies in unpredictability: songs that seem to have taken a well-defined path, but which suddenly morph into something else entirely. This is also the case with "Beauty Queen", which moves from a melodically driven, vaguely psychedelic song into a boogie digression before nonchalantly slipping back into its original theme. In "Strictly Confidential" Bryan Ferry's self-referential decadence reaches one of its highest peaks, expressed in a plea that recalls a theatrical performance more than a pop song, well supported by lyrics depicting a hero sacrificing his suffering to death, leaving a trace of it in one final, desperate letter ("Before I die I'll write this letter/ Here are the secrets you must know"); the track is an aching crescendo built on a single foundation, punctuated by a falsetto hook and brief backing vocals that heighten a pathos made even more intense by the despairing screech of Phil Manzanera's guitar.

Electronic after-punk reigns in "Editions Of You": the lyrics, as usual steeped in a dark decadence ("Here I am again looking at an old photograph/ Waiting to see the perfect vision/ Hoping something special will burst into my life/ Another fine edition of you"), clash with a drum part that sounds less played than battered, and with a biting sax used as intro and backbone to Eno's reckless synth excursions (perhaps never so lush), while Manzanera pursues loop solos that, kept in the background, feel almost detached from the context. Once more, Roxy Music's party-loving attitude and their vocalist's alienated theatricality lock into tormented lyrics that stop just short of psychodrama.

A threshold unusually crossed in "In Every Dream Home A Heartache", a prayer in the negative aimed at excavating the dark bewilderment of someone playing a (losing) game against their own obsessions. The track fully exploits several glam-aesthetic clichés, the allure of unbridled luxury ("You float my new pool/ De luxe and delightful") and a perverse fetishistic streak ("Your skin is like vinyl/ The perfect companion") to lead us into a spiral in which the anguish suggested by the title turns out to be, all things considered, the lesser of evils. Ferry's litany, brimming with tension, unwinds in a monotone for more than three minutes, backed by a bed of keyboards barely sustained by a minimal sax; the device used to depict his own turmoil is the inflatable doll that becomes the perfect lover: silent yet shapely, she can be loved without fear, being a creature literally given form by her lover's own breath ("my breath is inside you"). The parable of woman-as-object, taken here to its extreme, reveals a misogyny driven more by fear of one's own abysses than by genuine hostility toward the opposite sex; and indeed, the prayer closes with a pained "I blew up your body/but you blew my mind", before exploding into a jarring rock solo where flanged drum rolls push the guitar toward Ferry's liberating vibrato finale, as he finally proclaims the expression of his insane madness ("Oh, those heartaches/ Dreamhome heartaches").

The over nine minutes of the grotesque dance that is "The Bogus Man" is as avant-garde as pop got in 1973: through the unfurling of this tribalism of the absurd, accompanied by accidental interjections of tape here, guitar there, but above all by a disembodied saxophone that plays off the squared-off bass and the vocal's hallucinated falsetto, a fundamental future rock project suddenly seems conceivable — one that in 1977 would take the shape of Talking Heads.

The melodic "Grey Lagoon" is the most reassuring song on the album, recapturing the moods and sudden digressions of "If There Is Something" (from the debut album) while at the same time anticipating the no less charming but more accommodating sound blend of the Roxy Music of "Stranded" and "Country Life", the albums that followed Eno's departure.

The title track that closes the album sublimates the "reality/fiction" dichotomy, the true leitmotif of the record: an echoing piano, over Thompson's muffled drumming, takes hold of Ferry's equally reverberating voice as, in a swaying slow dance, he watches his own decadent poses fade into an indolent, resigned mysticism; it's here that the band draws unabashedly on sacred Celtic mysticism: "...you watch me walk away...", and so the curtain falls, and the stage empties into the final, infinite evocation of Tara, the sacred hill of the High Kings of Ireland, the Land of the Grail and of the sword Excalibur, of harmony as the highest earthly perfection and as an ideal bridge to the Afterlife.

Theatricality, decadence, drive, biting self-irony, the centrifuge of a music born of modern media culture: "For Your Pleasure" is, for our pleasure, pure Pop Art.

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08/11/2006