For Your Pleasure

by

Roxy Music

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The second, and best, Roxy album, and the last before Eno left the group. For me, this choice is the most rooted in personal nostalgia. While I do think it stands worthy in a top 10 list, its presence here is admittedly partly because Roxy Music was pivotal for me, and this album more than any other. As an early teen, I was blindsided by this lush, complex, and defiantly sexy sound. Half from Brian Ferry's James Bondish presence, half from the experimental rock backing him, I was changed. I would lay in my room at night with headphones on listening to Roxy Music for hours. In Every Dreamhome A Heartache is simultaneously beautiful, silly, sexy, absurd, epic. It just dares you to not smile, and swoon.

Roxy Music's second album "For Your Pleasure" has by many been appointed to the group's best and most important. And, yes, there are several fine songs to be found on the album. "Do the Strand" is real early Roxy Music style - very ala "Virginia Plain" - a great piano-driven rocker.

"Beauty Queen" is a fine melodic ballad - perhaps the album's most enduring song.

"Grey Lagoons" also belongs among the best numbers on the album.

The title track could have been the highlight of the album, but the great melody and the fine guitar theme gradually disappears into oblivion as the track evolves into an instrumental marathon where the original melody gradually is abandoned - too bad.

"Editions of You" is an accomplished rocker.

The rest of the tracks are for my taste either too sketchy or prolonged or downright boring.

Not a bad album, but in my opinion far from their best. The three subsequent albums "Stranded," "Country Life" and "Siren" are along with "Avalon" far more well-rounded albums. Personally I have always thought that "Siren" is somewhat underestimated.