Roxy Music

What's the precedent for this album? Like the London band that created it, Roxy Music sounded like nothing else in 1972, and the only thing it resembles today is Roxy Music's next album, 1973's For Your Pleasure. Bryan Ferry has an astonishingly mannered vocal approach here, as if he decided to sing what the celluloid heroes of yesterday's melodramas conveyed through silence. Like David Bowie, a kindred cracked actor of song, Ferry and his compatriots invented a new language by combining their favorite tongues — Anguish, Angst, Ennui, Lust and, of course, Make-Believe. The result is still recognizably rock 'n' roll: For a moment toward the end of "The Bob (Medley)," it's even boogie-woogie. The incongruous midsection of "Would You Believe?" sounds like crazy people trying to be the Beach Boys, while "Re-Make/Re-Model" points the way to punk. But all of these are so much more than the few inspirations one can trace.

Phil Manzanera's solo in "Chance Meeting" — the one that careens and crashes through this unconventional electric piano ballad — walks a thin line between stirring melody and extreme distortion. The oboe that Andy Mackay blows so strikingly in "Sea Breezes" had surely never appeared on a rock… read more »