Pazz and Jop 1974 #7

Roxy Music – Stranded

Every time I listen to early Roxy Music, all I hear is a band that’s trying too hard to – well, what they want to accomplish is the mystery, but it definitely isn’t about entertaining the listener. Yet again, they seem to be trying to straddle a non-existent line between art band and pop band, never realising that the latter is worthy of being art on its own terms. What they end up with manages to accomplish, well, not much worth listening to, for my money.

Oh, it isn’t horrible: they are talented musicians and songwriters, and that has value, but somehow it all just feels horribly flat when the whole package comes together in the grooves. When I look at the track listing, not a single title comes back to me in my imagination. I make notes (because I’m a non-professional, damnit), and from those I can tell you what stood out. But even if my future non-professional music writer status was on the line (it could happen), identifying without prompts what I liked about this album would tax me beyond recovery.

From those notes, I can tell you that Bryan Ferry’s odd vocal style sounds at times like an alien trying in vain to master the local tongue. That the songs are mostly too busy, with jarring tempo shifts and a wilful opposition to allowing anything that pleases the ear to continue unassailed. That a lot of this feels like progressive rock without the label.

As for the individual songs, I like the warped funk opening of “Amazona”, the interplay of drums and piano on “Just Like You”, the piano opening on “Sunset”. Besides these snippets, the powerful “A Song for Europe”, with its “Berlin”-era Lou Reed vibe, beautiful tinkling piano and tempo shifts that are not merely ornamental but increase the song’s drama, is the one track that feels like it finds a balance between whatever artistic statement the band is trying to make and actually giving pleasure to the listener.

I won’t escape Roxy Music anytime soon – two of their albums made the top 20 of the Pazz and Jop in 1975 (a year full of pairs). My hope is that even the embryo of the band that made “Avalon” had shown up by then. Otherwise, I may just recycle this post and change the names where appropriate.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1973 – #4

Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure

(This is going to get a bit meta, so please bear with me. I will (eventually) get to Roxy Music.)

A while back, a friend described what I do here as criticism. I don’t think that’s accurate, though I do have opinions about what I listen to because, hey, I’m a human being with functioning ears and a soul. I think a lot of the time, music critics feel like frauds. Everything cultural is about taste, and we all have it. I may think you are crazy for liking Jethro Tull, but what I can’t say is that you are wrong to like them. Well, I can say it, and you can tell me to go to hell and that I’m just as crazy for liking Olivia Rodrigo. And we are both right, and also both wrong. And it doesn’t matter, because everyone who disagrees with us can ignore anything we have to say on the issue.

I (almost) never feel like a fraud on this blog. I do this for free, so if I want to babble on for several paragraphs then take a parting shot at a band – it’s coming – I can, and you can read it or not. But what about people who get paid to do this? What is a writer to do when an editor needs 500 words on something you don’t give a shit about and the rent is due?

It’s easy to write about things I love – just open a vein, as they say, and it flows out, whether it’s an old love like the Bay City Rollers, or a new one like Can. It’s also pretty easy to write about things you don’t like – I rather enjoy coming up with new digs at Jethro Tull. The worst are things I like and respect but don’t feel passionate about, or that I can’t connect to my own experience. Stevie Wonder is frickin’ awesome, but I had so little to say about “Innervisions” that the piece I wrote doesn’t even sound like me. If you’re reading this, it’s because you like my voice, and if that’s lost, I don’t really have anything to offer that you can’t find somewhere else from someone who knows a buttload more about music than I do.

Anyway, my point (you knew it was coming) is that, while it is growing on me a bit, this feels like a record that only a music critic could love from the get-go, because it invites extensive commentary, and soon enough you have those 500 words. It all seems very clever and creative, but to me there is almost nothing here that grabs the listener and makes you pay attention. It’s a very mannered record, all artsy pretense and rich sounding and dry as fuck. The one track that stood out was “Grey Lagoons”, with a rockabilly feel dominated by pianos and horns that is just messy and energetic and fun. This record definitely needed more fun. But critics loved it, and through some madness it ended up as the 4th best record of the year in their estimation. If anyone actually listens to this for pleasure, I’d love to hear from them. Because I have a 10cc record I think they should check out – and Olivia Rodrigo, too, for that matter.

Not the Pazz and Jop 1972 – #17

Roxy Music – Roxy Music

If your impressions of Bryan Ferry were formed from listening to the lush bedroom vibes of “Avalon” or his early post-Roxy Music solo work, as mine were, you might also consider him to be probably the coolest man in rock. His singing never seems emotional, even when love is the subject. He always presents as slick and stylish, the most relaxed man in any crisis.

Of course, once upon a time, Ferry also told us that love is a drug, and drugs can have many different effects. With this first album, it seems the band wanted to try every option in the pharmacy, as if they might never be given the key again and so were afraid to leave out any experience. What we get is a band discovering what it is on the fly, and maybe trying a wee bit too hard to sound interesting, sometimes at the expense of making a coherent song. It’s a pastiche of styles – glam, pre-punk, art rock, honky tonk, rockabilly, country – that is wilfully disjunctive at times, as if they were testing how many tone changes a single song can contain.

My favourite track here is one of those messes. “If There Is Something” starts out country-tinged. I love the guitar when it comes in at the 1:40 mark (putting me in mind of the Procol Harum tune “Simple Sister”), and that motif is repeated later with other instruments. The song slows down, becomes more lush, lulls you with its beauty, horns build the emotion, then Ferry gets lost in angsty nostalgia in the last minute and a half. It’s a tour de force, a crystallization of what the band seems to be trying to accomplish.

Another favourite is “Would You Believe”, with a middle section that harkens back to a 1950s sock hop (or would if it were a bit less raucous). The synths in “Chance Meeting” capture the emotional turmoil of unexpectedly encountering an old love. Side two has some prog-rock pretensions (especially on “The Bob (Medley)”, which is wonderfully cinematic, and “Sea Breezes”) that would have made me anxious for the band’s future if I didn’t already know how well it would turn out. They don’t get bogged down in it, as if they were just trying it on, then thought, “No, that’s not for us”. Which can be said about a lot of things on this record.

In the end, while this is all a bit too confused to make it into my permanent rotation, it’s still great to hear a band at the beginning of its arc and compare it to what came later. Though I will always prefer the cool version, the immature hot mess certainly has its charms.

(Originally posted on Facebook, August 21, 2021)