Label: Virgin Records (Japan), VJCP-98139
Style: Art Rock, Glam Rock, Pop Rock
Country: London, England
Time: 41:47
Format: Flac Tracks 16/44,1 kHz
Size: 285 Mb
Charts: UK #3, AUS #26, AUT #10, CAN #47, GER #38, NOR #15, NZ #8, SWE #4, US #37. UK: Gold.
Band leader Bryan Ferry took the album's title from the British rural lifestyle magazine Country Life.
The
opening track, "The Thrill of It All", is an uptempo rocker that builds
on the style of previous Roxy Music songs such as "Virginia Plain"
(1972) and "Do the Strand" (1973); it includes a quote from Dorothy
Parker's poem "Resume": "You might as well live". Eddie Jobson's violin
dominates the heavily-flanged production of "Out of the Blue", which
became a live favourite. Esoteric musical influences are betrayed by the
German oom-pah band passages in "Bitter-Sweet", the Elizabethan flavour
of "Triptych" and the lighthearted, boogie-blues, Southern rock edge to
"If It Takes All Night".
"Three and Nine" has been likened to the
whimsical songs of the Kinks' Ray Davies, with Ferry looking back
nostalgically to a time of watching the moving pictures in cinemas in
his youth, for the pre-decimalization price of 3 shillings and
ninepence.
"Casanova" was singled out for praise by a number of
critics as a more cynical and hard-rocking number than the usual Roxy
Music fare. Like the earlier "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" (1973),
it was seen as a critique of the hollowness of the contemporary jet set,
and contained further instances of Ferry's idiosyncratic word
association ("Now you're nothing but / Second hand in glove / With
second rate"). A re-recorded version, more mellow than the original,
appeared on Ferry's 1976 solo studio album Let's Stick Together.
The
final track, "Prairie Rose", is an ode to Texas and sometimes mistakenly
thought as a reference to Jerry Hall. However, Ferry would not meet
Hall until 1975.
Shot by Eric Boman, the Country Life cover features
two scantily clad models, Constanze Karoli (sister of Can's Michael
Karoli) and Eveline Grunwald (who was also Michael Karoli's girlfriend).
Bryan Ferry met them in Portugal and persuaded them to do the photo
shoot as well as to help him with the words to the song "Bitter-Sweet".
Although not credited for appearing on the cover, they are credited on
the lyric sheet for their German translation work.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_Life_(Roxy_Music_album))
01. The Thrill Of It All (06:25)
02. Three And Nine (04:04)
03. All I Want Is You (02:54)
04. Out Of The Blue (04:46)
05. If It Takes All Night (03:12)
06. Bitter-Sweet (04:50)
07. Triptych (03:09)
08. Casanova (03:27)
09. A Really Good Time (03:45)
10. Prairie Rose (05:12)
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