Released
on September 21st, 1979, the fourth studio album by The Stranglers, The
Raven, turns 45 years old today. It's an album that saw the group
continuing to evolve beyond the rabble of "pub-punk" aggression,
developing their songwriting and musicianship to create music of
increasing diversity and nuance.
The
album, conceptually, leans into a lot of Norse mythology, especially
with the cover graphics depicting a raven on the front, and the band
photographed on the prow of a Viking Longship on the back. These
concepts are echoed in the album's first two songs, Longships and the
title track. The remainder delves into a variety of charged political,
social and philosophical topics, like Japanese ritual suicide ("Ice"),
heroin use ("Don't Bring Harry"), the Iranian Revolution ("Shah Shah a
Go Go") and genetic engineering ("Genetix"). "Dead Loss Angeles"
features guitarist Hugh Cornwell playing bass guitar in conjunction with
bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel, who wrote the song's heavy bass line. No
lead or rhythm guitars feature on the track, whose lyrics were written
by Cornwell about his experiences in the United States. Things even
take a turn into fringe conspiracy theories with the album's most
experimental composition, the munchkin voiced, dirge-looped
"Meninblack", a song that would be the springboard for their next album,
with its theme of mysterious aliens breeding humans for food. Taken
as a whole, it's all rather intellectual for a so-called "punk" band,
but these men in black were never that simple, nor simple minded.
The
album was originally released with a limited-edition 3D cover. Another
limited edition had to be created when the band was forced to remove an
image of Joh Bjelke-Petersen from the inner sleeve artwork.
Bjelke-Petersen was the subject of the album's sixth track, "Nuclear
Device (The Wizard of Aus)".
For
some fans of their early albums, the evolution displayed on The Raven
may have been a disappointment. I'm sure some critics of the time may
have seen this as an opportunity to let loose a backlash against
perceived pretensions. However, in my books, this is the beginning of
the period when their music became its most interesting and innovative, a
trajectory that would continue through the first half of the 1980s,
with subsequent albums like The Gospel According to the Meninblack
(1981), La Folie (1981), Feline (1983) and Aural Sculpture (1984). It's
the era of their career when they matured beyond the adolescent
misogyny that characterized their "punk" roots, and transformed them
into intellectual commentators on the sociopolitical circumstances of
the modern world.
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