Roxy Music - Stranded (1973)

Review by Joe McGlinchey @ Ground and Sky:

The tragedy of many of today's rock bands is a tendency to believe their songs are oh-so-profound and deep as hell, overemoting the lyrics about how misunderstood they are with enough angst to trample an elephant...all with apparent obliviousness to how appallingly shallow their material really is. One of the things that appeals to me about Roxy Music is that they almost seemed to work in reverse. With many of their songs, the ones you pair up with pictures of Elvis-Ferry, bug-goggled Manzanera, and drag queen-Eno, it seems like they wanted above all to push this image of a fun, outrageous glam band building their ivory pedestals to fashion, romance, and the jet-set ideal, all with whatever quantity of catchy, simple rock hooks they could cram along the way. But beneath that extroverted, if not wholeheartedly shallow surface, within Ferry's words and vocal performance, there lay a profound ocean of human feeling, with emotions like emptiness, insecurity, and self-doubt paving the water bed.

It is this tension, between superficial indulgence and internalization, which marks Roxy Music at their best. Stranded their third album, is loaded with it. I particularly love the way the songs frequently marry global, impressionistic, or third-person lyrics (at times so familiar sounding that they have the resonance of fortune cookie aphorisms) with introspective, often brooding, first-person dialogues. In "Just Like You," a beautiful meditation on impermanence, Ferry shifts quite abruptly from the "Time conquers innocence, pride takes a fall" pronouncements to the more personal, gloomy "Hopelessly grounded, I walk throught the streets, remembering how we spent time..." The music subtly connects with the lyrics: Ferry's double-tracked octave-separated voice gives the illusion of an ‘inner' and ‘outer' voice, as if thinking the words and saying them out loud to himself at the same time. Then, it shifts back again to the detached "Fashion house ladies, need plenty loose change/When the latest creation is last year's fab rave..." On "Amazona," Ferry initially puts on a thickly accented vocal, as humorous as it is sleazy — it reminds me quite a bit of the Christopher Walken character The Continental, from Saturday Night Live — singing "From Ama...zona...to El Do...rado...," only to have it slip abruptly into a sedated, broken-voiced "Hey, little girl, is something wrong? I know it's hard to carry on..." On "Serenade," he zooms in from third-person verses painting a descriptive scene ("Darkness falls, 'round your windowpane"), to a first-person confessional conveying both resentment and longing ("Maybe I'm wrong for seeming, ungrateful, unforgiving..."). On "Psalm," he seemingly genuinely sings "Believe in me.." only to step back and qualify it with the more detached "...once seemed a good line." Finally, on perhaps the most obvious example, there's "Mother of Pearl." The first half of the song is dedicated to conveying a removed image of nightclub life, with harried vocals that rush into each other too quickly and lyrics like "What's your number?" dissolving into a morning-after disillusionment: "Then I step back thinking, of life's inner meaning and my latest...fling..."

Just speaking of the lyrics in general, there are some eloquent, fantastic lines and images on this one, coupled with Ferry's unique brand of expression and delivery. He was always an excellent lyricist, and Stranded represents one of his peak efforts.

Musically, the band really jumps out on this one, and this album also marks the other band members inching their way into the writing credits. Although they had gotten rid of Brian Eno by this time in favor of whiz-kid Eddie Jobson, you can put me in the camp that says this was a decision for the better of both parties. I've never felt that Eno had all that much to do in Roxy Music, besides fiddling around with the VCS3 and looking the part of Eccentric Band Member #1. Jobson was without a doubt the more polished one for the keyboard role, and added another depth to the band with his electric violin skills (though these would be displayed more on subsequent albums than they are here). The band still had Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay to provide the left-of-center thrust needed to keep the songs from sounding too clean. From the opening notes of "Street Life," you know you are going to get a good rock tune. But from the concurrent dissonant strains of Mackay's saxophone in that opening, the hairs on your arm bristle a little bit, and you also know not to get too comfortable. And this continues on, from the gradual build-up of faux-gospel "Psalm," to the ridiculously over-the-top bombast of "A Song for Europe," to the gentle ache of "Sunset" that closes out the album.

Stranded was one of the hardest of their early albums for me to get into, but out of all of them, it's provided the biggest pay-off in the long run. I still play it regularly and enjoy it each and every time, after all these many years. One of the peaks in a classic run of albums.




Tracklisting:
1. Street Life (3:29)
2. Just Like You (3:36)
3. Amazona (4:16)
4. Psalm (8:03)
5. Serenade (2:58)
6. A Song for Europe (5:45)
7. Mother of Pearl (6:50)
8. Sunset (6:03)

Total Time: 41:00

Line-Up:
- Eddie Jobson / synthesizer, violin, keyboards, synthesizer violin
- Bryan Ferry / piano, keyboards, vocals, voices
- Phil Manzanera / guitar
- John Gustafson / bass
- Chris Lawrence / bass, string bass
- London Welsh Male Choir / choir, chorus
- Andy Mackay / oboe, saxophone
- John Porter / bass
- Paul Thompson / drums, timbales, tympani