Your Favourite Roxy Music Album

Sentimental favorite is 'For Your Pleasure' but I think their best album as a band was 'Stranded', with 'Country Life' a very close second.

Flesh & Blood and Avalon are amazing and much cherished but by then I think they were less Roxy the band than Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music.

I agree about the CD box too - it is everything a box should be - comprehensive, a beautiful artifact and it sounds great. Would that they would do a Bryan Ferry box of the same quality.

 

I couldn't agree more re. a comprehensive BF solo box. I'm hoping that with the release of the first batch of BF albums on SACD, something similar might be in the works. Not too keen on the new SACD masterings though, unfortunately...

 

I think it has just become the Audiophile Holy Grail. Anytime someone wants to show off their amazing stereo system, they reach for Avalon, it seems, and that has overshadowed the rest of the Roxy catalog, kinda for the wrong reasons. Fidelity isn't everything for some of us. No offense.

 

Surprised at all the love for Avalon (to my mind, one of their weaker efforts). It's still supposed to be their biggest seller, isn't it?

 

Avalon - to each his own, right?

 

See my previous post: People who prefer their later, glossier sound all voted for Avalon, whereas people who like their earlier sound dispersed their votes pretty evenly among various releases, so I'm not really surprised at the result.

 

Yep, you're right: Avalon is the favoured album of the 'casual' fan and the one most likely to be owned by the person who only owns one RM album. But RM 'heads' definitely seem to prefer the pre-Manifesto stuff.

I'm not a huge fan by any means but I think they were about half the band they had been after the 1979 reformation.

 

No. 1, because although FYP is my next choice and the recording/mix is a huge improvement, it felt like they had already started becoming normalised (in song writing) by then.

No.1 still sounds strange today – the songs are more free-form and episodic, and overall the music more blatantly alien. It's that bifurcating mix of traditional 50s rock and roll riffs and the musical ideas of some future and distant imaginary world. I still wonder about the weirdness of the single Virginia Plain and how it became a hit.

But single-wise, Pyjamarama is the best.

The first two B-sides were good, too. Especially the Morricone-influenced track, The Pride and The Pain.

 

1-Avalon
2-Manifesto
3-Flesh & Blood

 

Flesh and Blood is my favourite.

 

FYP - I guess I'm more in the early stuff camp. I'm pretty sure I've voted for Country Life and S/T before in other polls. I've heard people say Eno's favorite is Stranded, which surprises me. I find it the most average of the first 5, though I don't dislike it. But, so what.

 

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My introduction to Roxy was Flesh and Blood. I loved this album as a kid for the new-wave feel it had. I then purchased manifesto, which almost killed the band for me considering how unpopular anything remotely disco sounding was in the 80s. But then Avalon came along and sealed the deal by cementing this album among a handful of my all time favorites.

I've tried more than once over the years to get into their earlier music. Back in the late 80s, I found that their early music was so different from what I expected and was hoping for that I never had the patience to listen all the way through any of their early albums. But my tastes have widened a great deal over the past 15 years, and after trying again in the last 6 months I'm finding that I think that their first album to be brilliant in the variety of styles, and its competence in every single one of them. The only thing which I really dislike about it is how badly out of tune a lot of the singing is on it. And manifesto is much better than I remember it being (now that I'm over my anti-disco prejudices as a kid). And surprisingly Flesh and blood only has a couple of songs which really interest me anymore.

I'm gradually working my way through some of their earlier music. And Sirens is pretty good too. I'm not sure if I'll ever enjoy Country life though.

 

Not surprised for all the love for Avalon as most folks probably don't have any other Roxy. it's certainly the safe choice.

 

For Your Pleasure

 

He did say that.
I've always kind of thought he was just being diplomatic or polite when he said it.

 

I didn't know that. So they have trees in Portugal. Were the c... err, I mean women Portuguese as well?

 

Maybe he was being magnanimous, or maybe the avant-gardist was acknowledging the strength of pure musicality?
I don't personally agree with Eno, but there's a point where the experimental mind can undermine the heart and soul of music. It's a careful balance.

 

German. Ferry met them in Portugal, whether they were shot there, I do not know. Did he take the actual shot?

 

I have no idea what you just said, but sounds good to me.

 

I'm sure you're joking. But, I said that, sometimes weirdness just gets in the way of music!

 

But before you said that you didn't like the second album as much because it sounded like they were normalizing the songwriting, compared to the first album, which seemed a bit odd to me since For Your Pleasure still has several strange, experimental tracks. I tend to think that Eno was just being self-deprecatory by saying that Stranded was his favorite.

 

After a lot of thought I've gone with 'Stranded'. I was gutted when Eno left and approached this new release cautiously. However, 'Street Life' knocked me out. One of the best singles ever.

 

Also Amazona, Mother of Pearl, Psalm, A song for Europe...great record!

 

Indeed so. I remember listening to 'Mother Of Pearl' on late-night Radio One before they went FM. With static and hiss and the rest, the signal & volume waxing & waning, in '73 ('74?), it seemed other-worldly.