LP Reviewed in Sounds, 22nd September, 1979
“The Raven” (UA UAG 30262)*****
The Stranglers | The Raven | (United Artists) 1979 | CLIFF RICHARD doesn’t come into this review that much but he’s a constant figure in the background. Thought I’d tell you that before you get mixed-up about the Stranglers and huff and sniff about ‘The Raven’ as if you didn’t need it or, if you did, thought you didn’t have to pay much heed to anything this side of mechanically reeling in the product.
It’s so funny how we don’t think anymore: the Stranglers are ya boo sucks nastymen, sexist, pig-headed, dirty, noisy, slightly controversial and terribly, terribly safe somehow amid it all.
A sort of rock and roll Fawlty Towers, they threaten but rarely insult the fan, and prove really a big friendly monster at the end of the day, coming out as sheer fun more than anything else.
Which leaves the Stranglers a major oddity, a fact that ‘The Raven’ compounds wonderfully. Nothing is as obvious about the Stranglers as it seems, which is my way of saying that this is the best Stranglers album and probably (side by side with Slits, Fall and Undertones releases) one of the year’s finest.
In itself this is unusual, that a band’s fourth album should see them in different but better shape than they’ve ever been, especially when you consider the number of times you’ve felt that they were dead and finished (viz the second album, all the ensuing singles, live album, Burnel’s solo flight and ‘Duchess’).
different rock and roll time-span
But the Stranglers live off a different rock and roll time-span than most, which brings us back to the Cliff Richard analogy at the beginning.
It’s an arbitrary but suitably bizarre parallel, but like Cliff the Stranglers‘ career seems destined to be one of uneven bumps, dips and pinnacles and it’s due to a similar uniqueness in the artist’s persona (and just to get rid of Cliff baby let’s naively say his recent zenith sterns from good health and lots and lots of sleep).
The album is full of rich, inviting atmosphere, and that’s undoubtedly the keyword for the record throughout.
Take the opener, the wispishly Burnel-vocalled title track, like the rest of the album filled with swirling keyboards patterns that swing in melodic splendour over a rolling ‘Toiler’ type tale of woe, where Burnel sings “Sometimes I behave just like a child,” before the album swings into the black funk of ‘Dead Loss Angeles’ and the almost soulful qualities of ‘Just Won’t Do.’
The Stranglers | The Raven | (United Artists) 1979
For the most part it seems a straight division of creative tasks between Cornwell’s archetypal Stranglers songs, like ‘Shah Shah A Go Go’ and the stately ‘Baroque Bordello,’ each with the usual black bassy framework, and Burnel’s less concise, more diffuse style on ‘Men In Black’ and ‘Don’t Bring Harry’ on the second side.
The latter could me the best thing the band have ever done, evoking a classic ’60s French cinema feel in ominous fashion, succeeding in the same vein where most aspects of JJ’s solo album failed.
The song brings all Burnel’s chief traits together, the French high artistic craving, the Japanese warrior pathology and the friction between these and other aspects that expresses itself in wilful, child-like destruction.
It’s an astonishing song and alone worth the searching that went on in ‘Euroman.’
Sentimental atmosphere
In total ‘The Raven’ is a rich, classic album vibrant with atmosphere and edge. Perhaps this uneasy backcloth, so vital to ‘The Raven’, is the result of the frictional, schizoid split between the over-compensational greed for power and the feelings of deep down sexual and personal inadequacy that only comes across in the child-like aura of ‘Duchess, ‘The Raven’ and ‘Don’t Bring Harry,’ where maybe the close to sentimental atmosphere is the giveaway.
I don’t care too much about the personal hang-ups, it’s their rich creative expression that makes them marvellous food for criticism and renders ‘The Raven’ a bold, outstanding portrait, where like anything of value it’s the things that aren’t said as well as the things that are that count.
The message? Never underestimate an enigma. And that includes Cliff Richard. Get it. (Dave McCulloch)
THE STRANGLERS The Raven (United Artists)
Article published in NME | 22nd September, 1979
HERE comes the new mutation, same as the old mutation. Insults aimed at foreign parts and politicians; romantic myth-making with a hint of sadism and huge dollops of unrepentant crassness; lascivious predictions of a heartless future; tongue-in-cheek horror stories and the merest whiff of that old-time machismo.
Familiar themes played to familiar tunes. ‘The Raven’ isn’t likely to win The Stranglers many new converts; lyrically, to a deceptive extent, and musically this is an introspective album.
And it’s the music that counts. For all their image-making and pontificating, when it comes to the grocery bills The Stranglers are plain old everyday rock ‘n’ roll stars; music’s what they’re selling. And in spite of the single success of ‘Duchess’, ‘The Raven’ is pretty much hard rock soft sell: not necessarily for fans only, but there aren’t many songs us pop kids can sing along with.
Developing the direction of the ground-breaking ‘Black And White’ album, most of ‘The Raven’ consists of riffular modules. Drop the stylus at any point and you hit on a tightly woven four or eight-bar pattern of skilfully interlocking riffs.
This is The Stranglers’ forte; they’ve honed it to an art form. All four are melodic yet regimented players, and they paste their parts together with a designer’s flair.
Regimented players
Predominantly at mid-tempo —there’s nothing with the adrenalin drive of ‘Tank’, ‘Sweden’ or ‘Robots’, or the brutality of ‘Death And Night And Blood’ — Black, Burnel, Greenfield and Cornwell construct masterly meshes of cleanly separated lines, circling, complementing, overlapping.
Hugh Cornwell is particularly impressive. Such an unassuming guitarist, he above all has come light years from his scratchy beginnings. Every time you pick him out he’s playing something unexpected, and on the rare occasions he plays a real ‘solo’ his touch is surprisingly delicate.
His contribution to ‘Don’t Brine Harry’ is an obvious stand-out. The album’s most unusual track — a dolorous Bradburyesque nightmare tale featuring what sounds like Burnel singing in the style of ‘Perfect Day’ Lou Reed — it’s illuminated by two long, crying guitar lines that might almost be called beautiful.
Manzarek
Dave Greenfield, too —the anonymous gent whose keyboards have shaped The Stranglers’ sound since their inception — has taken his Manzarek clone beginnings and allied them with an increasingly intelligent use of multiple instruments until he’s come to justify his voted position as rock’s top keyboard player — not the most versatile or technical, but the best.
He’s not afraid of discord but doesn’t use it for effect; nor does he exploit the mechanistic, impersonal sounds at his disposal for easy atmosphere — he’s a keyboard player, and as such puts the burgeoning hordes of synthesizer moderneists right in their place.
Unfortunately, though, the songs don’t always match up to the playing. In the way that a good midfield covers up for its forwards’ lack of firepower, several duff songs are rescued by the ensemble’s instrumental aplomb.
Strangely enough, the cases in point are the ‘international’ songs, all of them musical throwaways: the brooding ‘Dead Loss Angeles’ (“The plastic peaches there/On concrete beaches there/You see the leeches there/They’re soft marshmallow there/It’s all so shallow there . . .).
‘Shah Shah A Go Go’ (The Stranglers sum up Iran and come out with the thumbs down for Shah and Ayatollah alike, and Burners indecipherable anti-Aussie rant ‘Nuclear Device’, which doesn’t cut it musically at all.
Grunty bass style
It’s the one track where JJ’s grunty bass style infects the whole song rather than, as elsewhere, providing a hard platform for the others’ more ethereal licks.
There are in fact two other really awful tracks. Sensibly, they’re stuck away at the end of side two, ghetto-ised like the ‘black’ side of ‘Black And White’, and I’ve deliberately exempted them from all previous comments. The cuts you probably won’t ever play are’ ‘Meninblack’, a one-play black joke which sounds like an afterthought for ‘Euroman Cometh’ ( only here the galactic invaders cometh) —the obligatory Gothic workout a la ‘In The Shadows’, with sub-Tubeway Army ‘eerie’ electronics — and ‘Genetix’, a warning against scientists “playing God”, the best part of which is the bass solo.
Well, you have to expect these ‘tolerance testers’ — it’s The Stranglers’ way of showing they haven’t sold out. Still, on the side of the angels we have the lush, oddly ’60s-ish single ‘Duchess’, the previously admired ‘Don’t Bring Harry’, the really excellent title track ‘The Raven’ (classic Stranglers in the Nordic mould of ‘Toiler On The Sea’), Burnel’s insidious ‘Ice’ and Cornwell’s best singing performance ‘Baroque Bordello’.
No one could accuse The Stranglers of currying friends. This album quite deliberately shows them in all their lights, from jukebox pop to unlistenable new age tech no-rock, from subtle power to wilful ugliness.
Will The Stranglers ever make an unflawed album? Will Jean Jacques Burnel take up riding a Moped? (Phil McNeill)
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