(The following was inspired by two considerations of the band Roxy Music from bloggers Johnny Bacardi and Sean Collins.)
The cover to Roxy Music's Stranded (a.k.a. "The Third Roxy Music Album") clearly announced that this was No Album for Little Boys: a full-breasted model in a torn red dress, languorously lying on the ground with a "just laid" look. Inside the original LP gatefold, three rows of individual pics of the band - each row tinted different colors like an Andy Warhol silk screen - hid as much as they revealed. You had your typical longhaired guitarist, a familiar enough look for 1973, but who the hell was the guy with his hair slicked back?
It was Bryan Ferry, of course, lead singer and primary composer of this unparalleled Brtish prog-pop group. Stranded was not the first Roxy album that I'd heard, but it was the first that I thoroughly keyed into. "Street Life" was the immediate grabber - a yowling plaint that begins with off-key synth sounds and Ferry yelping, "Wish everybody would leave me alone!" - with "Mother of Pearl" a close second. Both songs open on pure chaos, "Street Life" only barely climbing out of it, while "Pearl" quickly settles into a "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" vibe. (When Bryan Ferry opened his first solo album with a cover of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall," many critics saw it as a joke; I thought it was his means of tacitly acknowledging one of his foremost lyrical influences.) They're two of the album's most openly rock (third such track being the Spanish-tinged "Serenade"), and while the songs remain highlights after all these years of listening to it, they're only part of Stranded's story.
To be honest, much of this album eluded me at first: slower, even more elliptical, more quietly pretty than the bombastic cuts that first grabbed me, it hardly fit the profile of glam rock (where the band was frequently miscategorized at the time: think of groups like Sweet or Gary "Big Drums" Glitter). Indeed, most of Stranded is barely rock at all (hardest rockin' of the RM catalog: Country Life) - more like eccentrically personal cabaret.
And then there's "Psalm," eight minutes of solemnly religious lyricism (hard to tell how serious Ferry is being with this, but he did later do a cover of "Amazing Grace" for one of his solo albums, so who knows?), much of it just Ferry and his piano 'til Andy Mackay's improving sax, Phil Manzanera's guitar and Paul Thompson's heavily cadenced drums enter. If ever there was a track designed to test the patience of a fastpop focused listener like me, it’s this 'un. Yet Ferry's voice is so bald and affecting in this cut that I can never push "skip" on it.
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