[quote="rendezvous"]
For overall wall of sound-so-much-happening-brilliance I'm always blown away by Casanova from CL; stunning keyboards and powerful vocal from Bryan, Phil's stratospheric guitar, Andy's urgent sax, and Paul being Paul and boxing it together with thunderglue. It's a monster track.

Hipsters,
The ever tasteful rendezvous is more than correct, 'Casanova' is absolutely brilliant.
One of the things that W2 has been trying to do of late, is to listen to albums in their entirety and the exercise has led him to settle on 'Stranded' as his all time favourite. What a back to back absolute blast that LP is.
A work of pure genius!
Salutations,
W2.

Many thanks Windswept2.

It's great to listen to albums in their entirety and I can understand why Stranded leaves you feeling that way, a wonderful experience, side 2 is the Roxy equivalent of side 2 of the Beatles' White Album IMHO.

I was a HUGE Prog fan in the 70's and that was my path into Roxy, both through John Wetton's sometime bass role in Roxy and Eno's collaborations with Fripp.

My retardaire mastery of Roxy's catalogue coincided with the rise of Punk and my realization that interminable synthesizer solos and lyrics about elves were actually quite silly and not nearly so profound as I once believed.

There may be sonic similarities between Roxy Music and the progressive rock pantheon of King Crimson, Yes, ELP and Genesis, but Roxy was more about the 20th Century art tradition and only KC of the aforementioned bands was mining 20 Century classical music.

I think the structures of Roxy's compositions are relatively straightforward; the time signatures usually 4/4, instrumentation rarely straying form the standard rock variant of guitar bass drums keyboards and sax/woodwinds. I don't think musical complexity is the point. It's a collage of Rock and Pop reverences with an added dollop the Avant Garde (drone and electronic experimentation), all filtered through ironic sentimentality. It simultaneously "arch" and sincere, and in that I believe, lies its complexity. Deep within the soul of the cynic lies the tragic romantic.

Hmm, wise words Eero. Trouple is, they shouldn`t get so complex that they won`t be played on the radio. And BF`s music shouldn`t get so dense that it won`t be played on the radio, or else people would think; "Wtf, what is this? Turn it off!" (not my choice of words). Remember what the lyrics of "Oh Yeah" said; "...on the radio". That`s what counts.

Oh good topic

Most complex IMHO - from rhythm point of view

1. She Sells - purely from a time signature point of view
2. Amazona - different feels, some odd time sigs as well
3. Sea Breezes - seems all backwards to me

There we go - would be nice to have a musical point of view on this