Country Life

Sealed - Brand new 180 gram 1 / 2 speed remastered vinyl,

Country Life is the fourth album by English rock band Roxy Music, released in 1974 by Island Records. It was released by Atco Records in the United States.^[1] The album is considered by many critics to be among the band's most sophisticated and consistent.

Country Life peaked at number three on the UK albums chart. It also charted at number 37 in the US, becoming their first record to crack the top 40 in the country. The album includes Roxy Music's fourth hit single, "All I Want Is You", which, backed with the B-side "Your Application's Failed", reached number 12 on the UK singles chart

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 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.^[2][3]

"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 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.^[4]