The GB Album Club 014 - For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music

Duders! Welcome to the fourteenth edition of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, we discussed the hippity hop! Beats. Rhymes. Proof of humanity and perspective via the reinterpretation and transformation of pre-recorded sound to create new works of art. (Aka sampling.) This week, we've got our first true music canon album! (Insert needlessly vitriolic rant about the gatekeeping rock-ist bias of the music canon I didn't have the energy to write. For now.) That's right, it's For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music! This album was selected by @redwing42, and you can listen below:

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Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we built ourselves a pool of albums and we select one at random to talk about every week. To participate, all you gotta do is listen to the album and comment below! Want to talk about it some more, or talk about other albums? Join our Discord! We talk about songs and video games and sometimes songs in video games and so much more. Also, that's where you need to be if you want to contribute to the next cycle of albums, which we swear is approaching! There's only 5 albums left in the pool. So come on down!

The first couple Roxy Music albums are really something. Not only do you have these art school students trying to figure out what kind of music they want to play, but there is a real tension between Brian Ferry and Brian Eno about what direction to go in. Once Eno left, Roxy Music refined into their much slicker form which was a perfect fit for the disco era and the 80s. Before that, though, you get this beautiful mess. Just look at these outfits.

This is a hell of an album, though I think they're pretty much great until the Flesh + Blood/Manifesto twofer (they have jams, too, fwiw) and then the comeback of Avalon. One of the best bands, full stop. Entire bands have chased what they did on the first two albums with limited success, though I'm still way into what they did after Eno left, and I wouldn't trade his solo stuff and ambient career for the world. Dude's new album is something else!

So my only exposure to Roxy Music before this album was "More Than This." Roxy Music, and For Your Pleasure, were a huge blindspot for me. Still are, really.

Why I never listened to For Your Pleasure, despite being well aware of the prestige it has earned, had a lot to do with a period of my life where I basically didn't want to listen to anything with a guitar in it. My form of rebelling took the form of rejecting "the canon" in favor of listening to the more neglected genres, mainly hip hop and so on. I still think there is a heavy rock bias to which albums from the past we venerate and which ones we don't, and a lot of that has to do with racial biases within certain eras of music fandom and critique. But I wish I didn't reject the music outright, despite the fact that I've made up for a lot of it in my adult life. But there are still holes, like Roxy Music.

As my perception of Roxy Music was largely shaped by "More Than This," I was not expecting For Your Pleasure to be what it was.

To be honest, at first, the strangeness of this album kept me at an arm's length, but that had much more to do with expecting smooth pop songs as opposed to highly experimental compositions that play with genre and dissonance and just about every music rule "More Than This" follows. Moreover, this album does a lot of things I normally can't stand. Example: I have a heavy bias against vibrato. Of course it can be used effectively, but nine times out of ten, I find it distracting and artificial and Bryan Ferry practically sings the whole album with vibrato. Add on top of that a million other pet peeves, and I was very turned off at first.

At first, I was willing to dismiss a lot of what this album was doing as more intellectually interesting than something that was going to make me feel anything. That this was an album I respect more than I actually like. But then, for whatever, the weirdness began to draw me on.

It started with me realizing I dug the unexpected creative choices on this album. Something musically gets set up, and instead of going where you think it's going to go, it takes off into the stratosphere. Then the rest just kicked into gear in my head for whatever subjective bullshit is going on up there and I ended up really enjoying it.

Not a canon album for me, or at least not yet. But I'll more than likely get there, as I will be going back.

FAVORITE SONGS: "Beauty Queen," "In Every Dream Home a Heartache," "For Your Pleasure"

This album felt like finding the musical missing link. There is so much in For Your Pleasure that clearly influenced a ton of acts that I enjoy. I don't know that I loved the entirety of any song, but I loved something in every song. What a profoundly strange, campy, delightful album.

@unclejam23: you should check out Siren and Country Life and the first one and Avalon (the one with "More Than This"). This one is actually my fourth or fifth favorite, even though I love it!

This ain't it for me, chief.

Honestly, I enjoy Roxy Music the most in greatest hits form. I think there is definitely something to be said for listening to the albums a handful of times start to finish, but if I actually just want to hear some Roxy, they really spread out their best songs to a couple per album. I want to go from Love is the Drug to Both Ends Burning to Remake/Remodel back to Love is the Drug (because that is their best song).

That's cool. It certainly has a large amount of "It has to be good, it's ART" vibes to it. It definitely isn't for everybody, but thanks for giving it a chance.

The first album is amazing and their best I think but this or maybe the third are more representative of the band as a whole, and are still great overall (a couple of albums after that also have good stuff on them, but I tend to go back to these a lot more). Hard to deny the influence they had on new wave and synth pop, or Bowie for example though I guess that goes both ways.

My faves here are tracks 2-5 and 8. The title track might be my fave because of how trippy it is, the endearingly silly "tara", and not getting boring despite being pretty repetitive, idk maybe it's just because it's getting late here hehe. My least fave is Bogus Man, it sounds like a kid's cartoon, the lyrics aren't that interesting and the arrangement just not interesting enough for a 9 min song. Grey Lagoons is solid musically (if kinda similar to If there is something) but lyrically doesn't grab me. The first is a good party song (better live for me) although I've always wondered if there actually is a distinct dance move for it like walk like an egyptian or teach me how to dougie, and what it looks like.

Ferry's singing style can get grating or seemingly unintentionally funny in some songs like psalm or a hard rain's gonna fall (dylan cover). He's not exactly a rock singer which sometimes feels lacking for certain songs or segments of them. But I think it works really well for these more experimental and campy albums, for the more melancholic ballads and for the glam which they kept going with later (but which wasn't as interesting without a twist like singing about the outsiders of society or with odd and entertaining imagery and delivery).

I would say check out bowie and eno('s non-ambient albums) if you like their early stuff the best, and maybe some krautrock like can or neu. Do the Strand, Editions of You and Remake/Remodel kinda remind me of the latter.

Probably going to end up doing all the Roxy discography at some point. One of my big musical interests is tracking the evolution of artists or bands over time. Whether or not they embraced change or stuck to the same sounds and all that. So in that regard, how one goes from an album like For Your Pleasure to "More Than This" is something I gotta know. (I gather it has to do with Eno, but still.)

Ferry really embraced his inner lounge singer the further along the discography you travel. It's like he started out dressing like one to poke fun at that style and discovered that's who he truly was all along. I was going to make a political comment here, but decided not to open that kettle of fish.

Don't get me wrong, still some fantastic songs throughout his career.

I've looked at that kettle of fish. Y'know, Bryan Ferry as a Conservative fits. Not sure he'll be welcomed back in Washington, mind. As for this album, I liked it a lot. I've not got much Roxy Music under my belt but this album gives you everything you need to know. Bryan's too good at the lounge singing, the band behind him are good enough to sell it.

So I just learned that Bryan Ferry, Eric Clapton, and Van Morrison are all 77 years old. You guys need to sort out your 77 year old rockstars.

@unclejam23: honestly, the first five albums are all pretty similar, even though Eno is on the first two. Then they take a break and come back with sort of...synth-ish, disco-ish stuff (that's perhaps overstating those influences) that has some bangers but overall is ill-fitting. So then they get to Avalon, and it's legit one of the most beautiful and sumptuous records ever recorded, their last one, and the one where the smoothness of Ferry's solo career really comes to the forefront. They're basically a band with two halves, and the second half is less successful except for one towering statement. But much like Pixies' Trompe Le Monde is similar to the early Frank Black solo stuff, this is similar to Ferry's Boys and Girls. It's slick as hell, but boy does it work. I don't think Eno has much to do with that transition at that point, so much as it was the early 80s and it was the style at the time, but they certainly went out on top.