283. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure (1973)
















Track Listing

1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache
6. Bogus Man
7. Grey Lagoons
8. For Your Pleasure

Review

Another pretty amazing album by Roxy Music and the second entry of best musician of all times Brian Eno on the list. Roxy Music are my favourite band, and their two first albums with the Eno are something else. There is a constant tension here between experimentalism and accessibility which make these albums some of the most interesting things ever to come out of the UK.

Interestingly the album ends up being both experimental and weird and accessible! There is an incredible tension between Eno and Bryan Ferry here and it is natural that the band as it was would collapse after this, but what a wonderful farewell from Eno on Roxy Music this is. Some of the best art comes out of conflict and this is exhibit number 1 for the defence. A couple of year ago there was a list of the best British albums on the Observer and Morrisey (who I deeply dislike) had only one entry on his own top ten list and it was this album. It made me warm up a bit to the fucker.

This is something essential and if you only know Roxy Music for their Avalon phase you really need to listen to this and the début album to have a notion of where they are coming from. This is the best of the 70's and also the best of Glam rock. The sound is just so different that it doesn't sound modern for the early 70's or retro or anything, it sounds like itself, there are not many albums you can say this about. You really need it, get it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Editions of You
2. Do The Strand
3. In Every Dream Home A Heartache
4. Beauty Queen

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The group were able to spend more studio time on this album than on their debut, combining strong song material by Bryan Ferry with more elaborate production treatments. For example, the song In Every Dream Home a Heartache (Ferry's sinister ode to a blow-up doll) fades out in its closing section, only to fade back in again with all the instruments subjected to a pronounced phasing treatment. The title track fades out in an elaborate blend of tape loop effects. Eno remarked that the eerie "Bogus Man" displayed similarities with contemporary material by the krautrock group Can.

Of the more upbeat numbers on the album, "Do the Strand" and "Editions of You" were both based around insistent rhythms in the tradition of the band's first single "Virginia Plain". "Do the Strand" has been called the archetypal Roxy Music anthem, whilst "Editions of You" was notable for a series of ear-catching solos by Andy Mackay (sax), Eno (VCS3), and Phil Manzanera (guitar).

Editions of You:



Do The Strand: