FOR YOUR PLEASURE

For Your Pleasure is Roxy Music's most avant-garde record. The experimental impulse is largely due to the creative use of synthesizers by Brian Eno (in his last album as a member of the band), but also to Bryan Ferry's stylized vocals and unusual lyrics. The album opens with the frantic "Do The Strand", which sounds like an aesthetic manifesto in its lyrics: "There's a new sensation / A fabulous creation / A danceable solution / To teenage revolution". Together with "Editions of You", both songs have an energy and urgency that somehow anticipates the punk aesthetic. "Gray Lagoons" is another vibrant track, but unlike the two mentioned above it is predominantly instrumental, which makes room for Phil Manzanera's beautiful guitar solos. "Beauty Queen" and "Strictly Confidential" are slower and more romantic tracks, but they set the stage for the dark atmosphere that will dominate in the second half of the album, particularly in the triad of highlights "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", "The Bogus Man "and the title track. "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" contains lyrics that shows how a luxurious scenario can hide loneliness and an invitation to perverse desires - in this case, lust for an inflatable doll: "I blew up your body / But you blew my mind" . "The Bogus Man" is the most "Enossified" track, with nine minutes of hypnotic rhythm and weird sound effects. The lyrics seem to be a sequence of the adventures of the "Re-Make / Re-Model" stalker, but this time with darker contours, after all it is a sexual predator: "The bogus man is on his way / As fast as he can run / He's tired but he'll get to you / And show you lots of fun ". "For Your Pleasure", in its first two and a half minutes, seems to be a beautiful Ferry ballad. The final four and a half minutes, however, transform it in a disturbing and agonizing song - but in a sublime way. This title track ends in great style the best Roxy Music album - and one of the best art rock records of the 70s.