The Best of Roxy Music

by

Roxy Music

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This CD is obviously not meant for the Roxy Music fan, but rather is meant as an hors d'oeuvre platter for those wanting to sample their music.

In that regard this album is perfect. It is jam packed with music. Every one of their albums is represented on this CD providing a listener a reasonable way to find out 'which' version of Roxy Music they find themselves drawn to.

After owning this for about a month, I had a good sense of which songs I liked and went and bought the album that those songs came from - Siren - and now a few months later am happily listening to their first album Roxy Music.

This band is extremely difficult to approach. It is one of the greatest aquired tastes in pop music (especially their earlier stuff) and I highly recommend this album for anybody interested in them, but overwhelmed by how to approach getting into them.

First of all, let me say that I LOVE Roxy Music. When I first heard "Stranded" back in the mid-seventies, it literally hit me from 'out of the blue', changing the direction of my musical taste from that point on. From the first dissonant synthesizer notes of "Street Life", through the guitar shriek of "Amazona", all as backdrop to Brian Ferry's ambiguous croon, I suddenly realized there was much more out there in rock music than I had been hearing up until then. I put aside my Grateful Dead, Zeppelin, and Jackson Browne albums, exploring Eno, Bowie, Gong, John Cale and Lou Reed, among others. And later, as a twenty-something 'old man', I was open to and even ENTHUSED about the later punk bands descended from the Bowie-Eno-Roxy tribe and all their kin, allowing me the distinction of being one of the OLDEST slam dancers at many post-college parties and concerts. I owe all that to my music-store friend who lent me that cherished import copy of Roxy Music's third album nearly thirty years ago (wow!). That being said, if ever there was a compilation album that cried out for double-disc status, this is it. Not only are there many more terrific songs that should be favored, Roxy Music really inhabited two very different and distinct incarnations -- the first four studio albums (through "Country Life") and the last three ("Siren", the fifth, being the odd left-over released before their first dis-banding). The first disc would document more fully albums 1-4, and the second would include clips off the live "Viva Roxy Music" release added to a more extensive sampling of "Avalon" especially. If you have the dough, I recommend purchasing the compilation "The Early Years" (which does a pretty good job of covering albums one through three), add "Country Life", "Flesh & Blood", "Avalon", and maybe "Manifesto", then burn your own double (or triple) disc compilation. A word about these re-mastered recordings .... the absolute BEST thing about this compilation, adding to the recent re-release of the entire Roxy Music catalog as re-mastered editions, is the improvement in sound quality over all prior offerings. "Flesh and Blood" and "Avalon" were always among the best sounding albums I owned, both as original vinyl and later CDs, but these re-masterings have really enhanced ALL of Roxy's efforts. Five stars for that!