Roxy Music
Stranded

THE REVIEW

ONE LAST SIGH OF FAREWELL, GOODBYE
or the sunset over the London of Roxy Music

Here's one of those records that I eloquently like to call Time Machines.

With the flaming flash of "Street Life" I am catapulted into London of 1973, groups of boys and girls run down the street throwing sequins, glitter, and feather boas in my face, inevitably smudging blue eyeshadow on my eyelids. Freedom and excess are the watchwords, Andy McKay's saxophone doesn't invite me, it FORCES me to shake my hips to the frantic voices of Bryan Ferry. The falsetto in "Just Like You" is a sweet whisper that, contrasting with the distortions of the great Phil Manzanera, paints a boulevard that takes me forward in time a few more years to the funky vibe of Amazona.
I'm still running on a road that turns cobblestone beneath my feet and I find myself in the Middle Ages: I enter a church, and everything calms down while I listen to a prayer for voice and piano that envelops the pain and desperate salvation of my soul. It's "Psalm," and my spirit is filled with vibrant divinity...

But it's after a bubbly "Serenade" that the true masterpiece arrives... with "A Song For Europe," I'm no longer in London but across Europe, and visions of the past frustrate my peace, dissolving before my eyes a love distant as a faded photograph. A cold, painful, and anguished lyrical chant accompanies me from a café in the shadow of Notre Dame to Venice, where the gondola carries my obsessions to Rome... I hear the explosion of an orchestra and Latin verses recite the nostalgia of memories that melt into enchantment... but maybe I never moved from that café in Paris along the Seine, and I can't accept that what time has taken from me has vanished like the power of this tormented saxophone.

...But here I am teleported back to London on the lightning bolt of Mother of Pearl... I almost convince myself it's better to get up and dance to forget the past, when I realize it's no longer 1973 but 1873, I'm at the court of Oscar Wilde and a dandy, part crooner part Casanova, sings out the delightful refinements of mother of pearl, embodiment of a beloved woman or everything that is exquisitely ambiguous, just like in the reflection of "Maybe yes, maybe no" in d'Annunzio's work: "looking for love in a looking glass world it's pretty hard to find".

...Until "Sunset," the metaphorical sunset par excellence: love, memories, music, travels in time and space, but also the ability Ferry has to amaze and move, everything is beginning to fade away... it's truly goodbye, and the group is aware of being at the "end of my day, my decline"... the last destination seems like a dissolve of a 1950s Hollywood film, during which I'm walking in backlight on a path that takes me to Avalon...

Now I'm alone in my room and I have "Stranded" in my hands, the last Roxy Music album, or at least the last of the Roxy Music that makes reality vibrate. The English band is only on their third album and from the following Country Life onwards, it's just decadence, the one the group perhaps narrated since their dazzling start in 1972.

From "A Song For Europe":
"And here by the Seine Notre-Dame casts a long lonely shadow... There's no more time for us, nothing is there for us to share but yesterdays...
Ecce momenta, illa mirabilia quae captabit in aeternum memor... modo dolores sunt in dies, non est reliquum vero tantum comminicamus perdita.
Tous ces moments perdus dans l`enchantement qui ne reviendront jamais..."