But mostly sans oboe and his contributions never ruffle the crystalline surface of the music. ![]() Mackay is there too, squeezing nice sax parts in wherever he can. Manzanera is there, but the songs are not geared towards showing off his unique guitar playing. More coherent and unified, but also more anonymous than Manifesto, the sound of Flesh + Blood has its starting point in the R&B of “Love Is the Drug” but injects it with tasteful, Nile Rodgers-influenced sophistication and then blands it out to the point where Ferry’s voice is its only truly distinctive feature. “Same Old Scene” was a fairly modest chart hit, even in the UK, where it lurked just outside of the top 10, but it’s almost exactly the sound that Duran Duran and their ilk would conquer the world with the following year. But is it any good? Well, yes, of course, very good indeed – and influential too, insofar as, like Manifesto, it seemed to dictate the pop sound of the immediate future. Sleek, suave and sophisticated, this music bore no relation whatsoever to the experimental glam/pop-art-rock of the early ‘70s, but Flesh + Blood isn’t the proto-New Romantic/New Wave of Manifesto either – instead, the band had finally arrived at their ultimate form which was, for better or worse, smooth, high-quality yuppie pop, an idiom which would reverberate through the decade in the sound of peers like Phil Collins and younger acts like Fine Young Cannibals.įlesh + Blood proves that Ferry had not lost touch with the zeitgeist, far from it it’s just that the zeitgeist of 1980 dictated that the album should look like an advertisement for deodorant and sound about as raw and edgy as an over-thirties disco. This is puzzling in a way, because, unobtrusively great as they obviously are, it seems clear from the sound of the album that what Ferry was really looking for was a drum machine. In place of the immortal Paul Thompson – and highlighting just how much his drumming was a key part of the Roxy sound – is a battery of highly-skilled session players. But although Flesh + Blood looks, in a very up-to-date way, like a Roxy Music record, it essentially sounds and feels like a Ferry solo album. Similarly, the sleeves and artwork have been given a polish, but essentially this series allows you to have the Roxy Music discography in the highest quality possible, rather than spoiling the fans with extraneous bonus material.īy 1980, Roxy Music was, after the ups and downs of the late ‘70s, finally just a trio: Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera. As with the others in the series, the sound is detailed and immaculate, but not revelatory – the original versions sounded good already, and these sound a little bit better. The series of new Roxy Music half-speed masters, cut by Miles Showell at Abbey Road, reaches its conclusion with the final two studio albums, originally released in 19.
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