My Top 20 albums for 1979 no 19

MANIFESTO

Year Of Release: 1979
Record rating = 4
Overall rating = 7

Roxy returns as a nearly faceless disco band, a pale shadow of its former self. At least, they don't embarrass themselves seriously...
Best song: AIN'T THAT SO

Track listing: 1) Manifesto; 2) Trash; 3) Angel Eyes; 4) Still Falls The Rain; 5) Stronger Through The Years; 6) Ain't That So; 7) My Little Girl; 8) Dance Away; 9) Cry Cry Cry; 10) Spin Me Round.

Roxy returns. They had better not.
I expected to like this album - at least, on second or third listen. I was mistaken. No, these songs aren't particularly bad, disgusting, offensive or schlocky. The band was much too skilled, professional and experienced to produce an overtly bad record. But this is not Roxy Music - not the band as I grew to like 'em over their glory years. This is a completely different type of music: your standard, 'polite' kind of tolerable dance music with nothing to make it stand out from an innumerable list of contemporary pop fashioners. Alas.

In a certain way, this album is the logical inheritor to Siren, with its general, simple love thematics, even if lyricswise it is more diverse than Siren, with all kinds of political statements (title track) and ironic social comments ('Trash'). Just like Siren, it is based on disco - but where the band was just flirting with the genre on that album, applying it to their needs and assimilating the genre's main elements to their luxuriant, decadent style, on Manifesto they simply take off their pants and jump into the boiling cauldron, if you pardon my metaphor. There are ten songs on the album, and out of the ten, all ten are disco - should that say something to you? Now you know that I don't really despise disco one hundred percent: there have been numerous decent usages of the genre, and, after all, 'Love Is The Drug' and 'Both Ends Burning' were both superb numbers. But this is different, because - and I mean it - the band has completely and utterly lost its schtick. These songs are straightforward, simple, rollickin' pop ditties, with just one word to describe them: 'generic'. First of all, what the hell happened to Bryan Ferry? His singing on this album just goes down the drain - where's that croon, where's that falsetto? Where, indeed, is the great emotional power that distinguished his voice so well? Who can explain to me how on Earth could that man completely lose everything that made his vocal power so outstanding in just three or four years? Okay, so one should also blame it on the modernistic production values: the songs sound completely 'late-Seventies', with electronic drums, hi-tech, programmed synths, disco horn arrangements, and restricted, dull guitars (even Manzanera sounds at an all-time low). But no modernistic production can conceal the fact that Ferry doesn't sound much different from the wretched Bee Gees guys at that moment. He clearly isn't trying - maybe his idea was that those baroque, sentimental tones of the past should be discarded in favour of the disco present? Whatever it was, it was wrong.

And the card house falls apart! Remember how I said about Siren that it was only made strong by Ferry's unique singing? Well, Manifesto is Siren minus Ferry's unique singing plus generic modernistic production values. Oh, and minus good lyrics, too: trying to sit through the lyrics sheet here almost makes me sick. 'Are you ready for bad blood?' 'I am for the man who drives the hammer to rock you 'til the grave?' Jesus Mary, don't let me start with that...

Truly, there's not a single 'good' song on the album - it never goes beyond 'decent'. As it is, it's even hard to pick a favourite. For the moment, the song I endure the easiest seems to be 'Ain't That So', just because I enjoy the intoxicating wah-wah riff that drives it forward. However, give me a week to think of any other reasons, because I simply can't say anything else about it. The chorus is catchy, I guess, but then, there are a few more choruses on this album that are also catchy, so this shouldn't be a good point. Whatever. One thing's for sure: the endless noodling of 'Stronger Through The Years', an endless disco jam with pointless saxophones all over the place, simply gets on my nerves and deprives the album of all the extra bonus points gained by 'Ain't That So'. YYYYYuck!

Sometimes you just don't notice when one song turns into another - yes, there are breaks, but they're all oh so mid-tempo and they're all oh so melodyless, oh so completely melodyless. It's like a textbook on disco written by a dry, stereotype-drenched pedant. If you're interested, I'll mention that the opening 'shaking' rhythm of the title track is exactly the same generic disco riff you'll also get on 'Another Brick In The Wall Part I', 'Run Like Hell', and probably about a billion other disco albums. What for? And really, I don't care naught about what Bryan Ferry thinks on the future of mankind, if he can't set his thoughts to anything with a trace of creativity. And the 'hit single' off the album, the wretched 'Angel Eyes', gotta be one of Roxy's worst ballads ever: if you happen to enjoy it, why not purchase the entire Eighties' Rod Stewart catalogue? The worst thing about it is that it was confused with the real 'Angeleyes', also a disco ballad, but far more interesting musically, and prevented it from rising high in the charts. Yeah, you're right, it's the ABBA song I'm talking about, and I'm serious, folks: ABBA's Voulez-Vous, their famous 'disco perversion' that came out the same year, is a far more interesting album: not to mention that it wasn't all disco, but even the disco stuff there was truly memorable and often inspired. Don't laugh at me, instead listen to both albums back to back and you'll see...

...but I digress. Okay, a couple more songs could probably pass the 'preliminary test' here: 'Still Falls The Rain' sounds like a weak, but passable Moody Blues song, with Ferry trying to imitate Justin Hayward for no obvious reason; 'Cry Cry Cry' is at least jolly, a short moment of tolerable fun among a sea of excruciating pseudo-romantic, pseudo-pessimistic Roxy parody, and the album closer, 'Spin Me Round', is probably the only song that comes close to something really heartfelt on the album, the most emotional saved for the end - definitely not a climactic one, but at least a pleasant one. And that's it. Highlights on the 'other end' include 'My Little Girl', a song that indeed sounds like the blueprint for about fifty percent of Rod Stewart's Eighties' albums, the above-mentioned 'Stronger Through The Years', and 'Dance Away', a blueprint for I don't know who. Modern Talking, perhaps. Bryan, Bryan, how could you fall so low as to become a ridiculous parody on your former self? Stay away from this album for as long as you may, it has nothing to do with the true Roxy Music sound. There's no doubt that history will rule Manifesto out of the band's catalog as a tragic mistake.