Roxy Music: Flesh + Blood - 1980
"There are moments on 1980's 'Flesh + Blood', in particular, where the band stop sounding tired and start sounding bored, a fatal difference" - Pitchfork
After the underrated post punk/new wave offering that was 1979's Manifesto, 1980's generally more popular Flesh And Blood is actually my least favourite Roxy Music album, despite there still being some good material on it. It seems very much a "treading water", "good in parts" piece of work.
It contains typically immaculate sound, of course, but it is not an album I come back to very often. It was this one, as opposed to Manifesto, that rally launched the now somewhat critically-clichéd Roxy Music Phase Two sound.
Anyway, to the good points - the singles Over You and the irresistible, radio friendly Oh Yeah! or "there's a band playing on the radio" as most people know it. Both were excellent singles and deserved hits. The first is a lively, catchy, handclappy pop song, while the second has a grandiose stateliness about it and an absolute killer of a chorus refrain. The drums, percussion and synthesisers, together with Ferry's classic vocal are pretty much perfection.
The slow, stately and gorgeous, typically Ferry My Only Love and the equally delicious groove of The Same Old Scene are almost classic Bryan Ferry solo numbers - same groove, same sound as was to be found on his mid-80s albums like Boys And Girls and Bête Noire. In so many was this is like a Bryan Ferry solo album. As I said, it is sonically perfect and washes over you like a warm bath, it doesn't ask anything of you as a listener, like, say, For Your Pleasure did, but it can give you a perfect background soundscape, should that be what you want. Indeed, the first seven tracks are a pretty rewarding listen. Oh Yeah! is superb, I have to re-state. Whenever I hear it, it takes me right back to the summer of 1980.The covers of Wilson Pickett’s The Midnight Hour and The Byrds' Eight Miles High are both acceptable (The Byrds one nowhere near as bad as many say it is, for me, anyway), but not a patch on the originals, of course. If either had appeared on Ferry solo albums they wouldn't have received anything like the opprobrium they seemed to for being on a Roxy Music album. I guess I can sort of see why - Roxy weren't a covers band, after all.
Flesh And Blood is an underrated, beautifully bassy grinder of a track with nice string orchestration, some gritty riffs, a convincingly haunting Ferry vocal and a simply delectable bass.
The last three on the album are debatably three of the band's most underwhelming numbers. Even now, they still don't stick in my mind at all. I struggle to write too much about them. Compare that the amount written about the songs from 1972-74. For the record, they are the slowly soulful and enigmatic Rain Rain Rain (that reaches an abrupt end, rather like a demo version); the very Ferry-esque, late-nighter No Strange Delight and the maudlin-sounding Ferry ballad Running Wild, a song that doesn't quite reach its full potential. Look, none of them are that bad but they aren't that good either, definitely not up to the quality of the material on the previous album. The first of the three is probably the best.
There you have it. Solid, slick, polished, professional and all that but ultimately unspectacular - Roxy Phase Two by numbers in many ways. The legendary music critic Greil Marcus said of the album - "like a perfect July day, it makes no demands on a listener, yet it can give a listener everything". I literally couldn't have put it better myself.
Lover was the 'b' side to The Same Old Scene and is notable as Roxy's first 'b' side to be a proper song with full vocals. It is a very smooth, laid-back Bryan Ferry solo groove of a song, that would have suited either the Avalon album, or Boys And Girls.
