Manifesto (1979)

"Spin Me Round" In the wake of new wave and all that it seemed to entail and promise, Roxy Music decides to stage a big comeback bid, minus a number of the critical figures who rode the train with Bryan Ferry from the beginning (though both Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay are on hand). To facilitate success, perhaps, it rubs off any number of the edges and burrs we had come to appreciate about this band through so many years of hard work, concentration, and dedication to the craft of what they seemed to be about. Ferry's voice is recorded with more clarity than ever, certainly in the context of Roxy Music, and it's deepening and mellowing and more confident too; much of that had already started on Ferry's solo outings following the breakup of the band. And they've obviously been listening to disco. No objections here. There's not actually much that I can think to carp about on this album—I liked it a lot at the time, and I still think it's one of their best. The intervening four years of their hiatus were not unkind to them. But there's an overweening sadness here too: the vim of youth is suddenly well behind them, replaced by a disquieting veneer of professionalism, and that sans irony (which I suppose, all things considered, is for the best). Where all the earlier albums had risked boredom and made mistakes and laughed and moved on, this is careful, like a person who has learned a lesson and come to embrace caution. It's not as much for our pleasure any more. At the same time, with the effort moving out of the cerebral regions it once ruled, it now appears to be knocking on the doors of our hearts: there's an emotional appeal at work that had previously been detectable only through peeling away the painstaking layers of irony on Ferry's earliest solo work. Growing old is a hell of a price to pay for maturity, but Ferry, more than ever the man in charge at this point, appears to have measured carefully the scope of his choices. (As for the cover, I believe it's a terrible pun: mannequin festival.)