The first serious attempt to accurately chronicle the life and times of both Roxy Music and the subsequent solo career of Bryan Ferry was spread across four sides of vinyl that really should have been expanded even further. It's impossible to complain, of course, about the album's actual contents - from "Virginia Plain" to "Slave To Love", every major hit is included, with personal taste as opposed to public comment singling out the handful of songs that could have been replaced - "Jealous Guy", for example, or "Sign Of The Times". Street Life topped the UK charts with ease, and nobody was surprised about that.
The problem is in terms of the distribution of its contents. Nine tracks cover the band's final three albums, five nip in and out of Ferry's stop-start solo outings, and just five more represent the band's initial incarnation. It was those early years, however, that saw Roxy best meld commercial success to experimental energy, and Street Life's meandering drift through that period is barely adequate.
The band's later years, meanwhile, were so successfully devoted to tracing the development of the sonics stumbled upon following the comeback that, if one's not really paying attention, lets the ear slide from "Dance Away" to "Avalon" without even noticing it's hearing different songs - and when Ferry's "Slave To Love" pops up at the conclusion of that sequence, you don't really notice that either. Not quite one dimensional, it is nevertheless faintly disturbing to hear all the joy and power that was Roxy Music so ruthlessly reduced to such a singular sound, and one comes away from Street Life oddly paraphrasing William Shakespeare. We came to praise Roxy Music; we ended up burying them. They were worth far more than this.