Cheap Stranded (Music) (Roxy Music) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Stranded

After the spavined weirdness of the first Roxy Music album, and the deeply disturbing follow-up For Your Pleasure, Bryan Ferry ousted Eno from the band and attempted something new with Stranded, not only for him but for all pop music -- a hymn to life, a Thus Spake Zarathustra in sound. But be warned: Anyone lucky enough to hear Stranded will spend years afterward searching in vain for anything remotely like it, and equally fruitless will be your many attempts to find a metaphor to describe it. Some will say it sounds like the aurora borealis, others that it's the essence of autumn trapped and bottled as a musical elixir. For me, it's like an amethyst rotating slowly underneath a concentrated laser, the spectacle being the mesmerically fluctuating veins of light inside. These gemstone comparisons are the hardest for me to resist, because Ferry crafts songs throughout more like a master jeweller than your typical riff-obsessed rocker. Song titles like "Mother of Pearl" were not idly chosen.

"Mother of Pearl," in fact, is the centerpiece of the album, an eight-minute wigout somewhere between a Can experiment and Sinatra. It roars out of the gates with abrasive guitars and cut-up vocals, then after a minute suddenly and unexpectedly slows down into a repetitive groove, giving Ferry space to play the tortured crooner. You can literally envision the nonexistent moment when, wiping the sweat from his brow, he pulls up a stool in front of his screaming fans for an intimate confession. All at once it's a deconstruction of rock cliches, a foregrounding of tried-on personas -- Elvis's in particular, who Ferry also channelled in For Your Pleasure's sublime "Beauty Queen" -- and a highly personal catharsis, but it's by no means dry. Anyone who dares to sing it at a karaoke bar will be the hit of the evening, and can expect to be raised aloft on the arms of the crowd like a soccer champion. It's that potent.

Everywhere on Stranded, Ferry's effects are just as perfectly chosen. The languid cello in "Just Like You" caresses you like a breath of autumn wind, but just when you're about to drift off into peaceful slumber, he follows it up with the seriously cranked "Amazona," which features the highest-pitched guitar solo in history. "Psalm" taps into religious ritual but makes it safe for the secular, while "Serenade" is a pithy Apollonic blast that ends with Ferry needlessly asking: "Will you swoon / As I croon / Your serenade?" "Song For Europe," having appeared to stunning effect in the Fassbinder flick In a Year of Thirteen Moons, was what made me seek out Roxy Music two or so years ago when, luckily for me, their entire back catalogue was being remastered. It has Latin and French lyrics and marks Ferry's not entirely successful bid to be considered alongside Keats and Shelley instead of Bowie and Bolan... but what other rock star would even try?

In short, while my generation may think Stranded belongs in the classic rock ghetto, most of what was released last week already sounds more aged. The macho gestures of most rock music just don't cut it after hearing the limpid and transparent textures Ferry coaxes from his mini-orchestra on this album. Stranded makes me wish far, far more pop albums were made by men instead of boys.

Begin of RM's longlasting (esoteric) cult of esthetic values
Stranded, Roxy Music's third LP, was the first album to introduce the post-Eno era. All things said, it has introduced it rather handsomely, with elegance and brio. Bryan Ferry's melodramatic, snobish and dandy-luscious style, finally gets its full echo and sway, in some very special songs like Amazona, the first-frantic then-ooming Mother Of Pearl, and the nothing-short of nostalgic Just Like You. Psalm is a beautiful composition in which love-inspired feelings are made to border on the verge of ecstatic religious longings, and sounds like a testament or legacy of Roxy Music's longstanding, almost mystical quest for the sublime (cf. No Strange Delight, The Main Thing).

All of the following albums treaded on this pre-set trend even more accutely, as the exclusive and somewhat esoteric cult of esthetic values remained omnipresent in subsequent productions, untill the band finally broke-up to re-unite once more for the recording of their mid-summer (cf. Stronger Through The Years) Manifesto. The almost dis-incarnate idealization of feminine beauty, an idealization sometimes bordering on cool-cold-blooded worship, an idolatry of forms and shapes and compositions, so omnipresent in the Artworks of RM's albums's covers, found a pretty accurate illustation in Manifesto's coverwork itself, namely a time-frozen representation of models, plastic figures, empty feelings, elegant superficiality, nothing more than what meets the eye, and also nothing less... (is there anything more than what meets the eye... or is there rather anything less...?). Pushed to its utter limits, RM's approach can be seen as a lucid and subtle satire of a modern, at times deviant (In Every Dream Home A Heartache, Bogus Man) overly elitistic cult of esthetic and visual values , and the almost religiously devotional feelings it is either rightly or unjustly apt to engender, i.e. feelings of joy, ravishment, ecstasy, rapture, transcendance (cf. The Thrill Of It All, Running Wild, Eight Miles High), but only too often followed by pain, disillusionment and emptiness, melancholy and nostalgia (cf. Bitter Sweet, End Of The Line, Sentimental Fool, Just Another High, A Song For Europe)

All said, Roxy Music was a highly spiritual band, and this album amply illustrates (even better than the following Country Life and Siren) their original artistic gender and path, a path to which they returned with a cool and laid-back Flesh And Blood (cf. Same Old Scene), and the misty albeit more mature Avalon (cf. While My Heart Is Still Beating)

Amongst Roxy albums, My favorita...
This one is where the heavier flavor of Brian Ferry's concept really began to become more apparent. His sense of tragedy had always been there, but it had been more couched in camp before ("Dreamhome"). Here, we are given full witness to a Tragic and Romantic European vision.

This was the first Roxy Music album I got, and it mystified me. There was something strange about the band, and also something very conventional at the same time. I would ask myself, "Are they serious? Or are they joking?" Tongue-in-cheek would be the term. I would always listen to it on a drive to my friend's house in the country I would make on Friday nights in high school. For me, this is a night time album.

"Mother of Pearl" is the masterpiece, as far as romantic Roxy Music goes.

After this, some of the brightness seemed to disappear as Ferry's lyrics became more and more concerned with loneliness, his puns became a bit more glib, and the music more straightforward.

The first album's a shocker, "For Your Pleasure" essential (slowly becoming on par with this one), and "Country Life" and "Siren," of a different vein, are both worth hearing, but "Stranded" wins for depth and subtlety.