For Your Pleasure is a sinister and unsettling record, abandoning the brighter elements of the band's debut (which were not that many to begin with) to concentrate on instrumental textures and more contemplative lyrics. Although the album starts out innocuously enough, with a parody of 60s dance crazes, it quickly becomes clear that there's something darker going on here.
Before I get into the songs any further, it's important to acknowledge the band's composition and musicianship, which is a big part of what makes this album so unique. Lead vocalist, frontman, and principal songwriter Brian Ferry has a voice that's like a bizarre cross between Bing Crosby's crooning and David Byrne's yelp. He has the air of a wannabe Romeo who is just too strange and awkward to realize that he will never be believable in the role.
In addition to the usual backing instruments (all played expertly), the band utilizes the talents of Andy McKay on various reed instruments, most notably saxophone and oboe. I don't know too many rock bands that feature oboe, and this combined with his saxophone work adds a weird blend of 50s rock and roll and some sort of foreign otherness that keeps any of the songs from sounding at all normal. Finally, we have Brian Eno on keyboards and, more importantly, sound manipulations. His brief career with Roxy Music predates any of his more familiar ambient work, but the signature style is already there, and very noticeable.
Eno's influence causes all the sounds on the record to be tweaked, filtered, and processed, making the whole thing sound weird and alien. Even when the basic structure of a song is simple and ordinary, it is this attention to detail that makes it remarkable, and even today there are few producers creating anything that sounds like For Your Pleasure. It's a terribly unique record even 40 years later.
Then there are the songs themselves. I think it's safe to say that Brian Ferry is a deeply strange person, and we are the beneficiaries of his strangeness. Strictly Confidential rides along a haunting oboe melody with vague lyrics about guilt, regret, darkness, and death. The Bogus Man is nearly ten minutes of plodding, paranoid instrumental jamming with occasional lyrics about a stalker. The album's tour de force is In Every Dream Home A Heartache, which rocks back and forth between a two-phrase melody as it slowly builds to its climax. You're unlikely to ever hear a better love song directed towards a blow-up doll. The lyrics explore perversion driven by boredom, and paint a chilling picture of a wealthy bachelor slowly going mad all alone in a luxurious mansion. The way the song slowly builds tension through repetition is masterly, and it will stay with you for long after the last notes have faded away. The album's closer, the title track, transforms a relatively normal beginning into an end that is almost Musique Concret, which layer upon layer of tape manipulation that becomes so abstract as to be unrecognizable by the end. An entirely fitting conclusion.
For Your Pleasure was to be Eno's last record with Roxy Music, which is a real shame, because the tension between his and Ferry's style really works. It's almost like a surreal Lennon-McCartney in which each brings out the best in the other, despite their wildly different styles. The story I heard is that Ferry became jealous of the attention Eno's eccentric lifestyle was getting from the press and booted him out of the band, but who knows for sure? Both artists would go on to pursue productive careers long after, but For Your Pleasure remains a remarkable document of a moment when competing artistic visions fused together in a way that surpassed either individually.
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