THE STRANGLERS - AURAL SCULPTURE @ 40

 

Released on November 5th, 1984, The Stranglers' eighth studio album, Aural Sculpture, turns 40 years old today. It's an album that saw the group reassessing their approach after going for an icy Euro-techno sound on their previous album, Feline (1983). For Aural Sculpture, the group opted to bring back a bit of warmth to their sound, though the emphasis on the beat was still prominent, albeit augmented with horn sections, female backing vocals, and an increased use of acoustic guitar.

Initial recordings for the album were self produced by the band, but the results from those sessions were somehow lacking, with the band feeling unconvinced by the results, and the record label insisting they bring in a producer to help them get their house in order. They'd originally considered hiring Marvin Gaye, but that couldn't happen when he was killed on April 1st. Eddie Grant was also in the running, but it was ultimately Laurie Latham who got the job. It was Latham who suggested the horn section and backup singers to flesh out the arrangements. The result was that a lot of material from the initial sessions was scrapped and a bunch more new songs were added during the second round of recording. The album was mostly a passion project between Cornwell and Latham, with J.J. Burnel being somewhat distracted by his ailing father requiring care before he finally passed while the album was being produced.

The album's release was a commercial success for the group, with three singles coming from it, including Skin Deep, No Mercy and Let Me Down Easy. Critically, the album was also well received, with most finding the album's nuances more welcoming than the detached austerity of Feline.

THE STRANGLERS - THE RAVEN @ 45

 

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.

J.J. BURNEL - EUROMAN COMETH @ 45

Marking its 45th anniversary today is the debut solo album from Stranglers bassist, J..J. Burnel, with Euroman Cometh being released on April 6th, 1979. While it was only a modest success at the time of its release, it has become something of a cult favourite over the years for its distinctive combination of electronics and rock & roll.

The album started to take shape in 1978 while The Stranglers were working on their third LP, Black and White. At the time, Burnel was homeless, and ended up sleeping at the studio most nights. To pass the time after the band had packed it in for the day, he'd spend the evenings futzing about in the studio. There was a basic, preset rhythm box on hand, which allowed Burnel to set a groove to build on, adding bass, vocals, guitar and synths, mostly on his own. As his sketches began to accumulate into something that seemed substantial enough to play for other people, an album concept started to emerge to the point where he was able to get a green light from Stranglers' label, United Artists, for an album release. Burnel then brought in a few guest musicians to help flesh out a few details. These included drummers Peter Howells & Carey Fortune, guitarist Brian James & harmonica player Lew Lewis.

The album came together conceptually as something of a manifesto from Burnel on the potential and dangers of a European economic union. It was a concept that was becoming a legitimate and seemingly inevitable political possibility at the time. The album mostly contains songs both celebrating European culture as a whole, while offering cautionary admonitions against American style cultural imperialism.

The album cover shows Burnel standing, dwarfed, in front of the the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which houses the Bibliothèque publique d'information (Public Information Library), a vast public library; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is the largest museum for modern art in Europe; and IRCAM, a centre for music and acoustic research. Its modernist, high-tech styling, with its complex layering of massive external pipes and scaffolding, provided an appropriately grandiose and imposing backdrop for the album and it's sweeping themes of uniting the European continent.

I've always been a big fan of this record because it is so idiosyncratic in its styling, with the frequent drum machine backdrop sounding somewhat brutal and crude along with Burnel's signature snarling baselines. The odd guitar and synth slashes and affected & processed lead vocals all create an obtuse, angular kind of edginess that had echoes in the work of DEVO and Bill Nelson's short-lived post Be Bop Deluxe project, Red Noise. It's decidedly distinctive, displaying very little resemblance to anything done by The Stranglers at the time, owing more to Kraftwerk and CAN. It's also been cited by Joy Division & New Order bassist, Peter Hook, as a major influence, which makes perfect sense to me.