Raven, The [Remastered] - Stranglers (The) > Reviews > All Hail The Big Black Bird

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Definitely a cut above the rest
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Original, ambitious, lyrical, dark
Disadvantages:	Original, ambitious, lyrical, dark (many dislike such traits)

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

It could be argued that people like me - a former diehard Stranglers fan that has since greyed round the temples and drifted reluctantly into middle age - cannot be relied upon to discuss our former musical loves in any objective way. We have a habit of insisting that "music was far better in my day" and that "modern music has no originality whatsoever". We might shake our heads ruefully and snort contemptuously at our youngsters when they plague our more cultured (and more hairy) ear with their modern noise. That would be a nonsense, of course, and I like to think I'm above such things. Popular music nowadays is neither better nor worse than it was in times gone by; it's just different, and a good thing too.

Which I hope will go to show that when I describe the Stranglers' fourth album, The Raven, as one of the best albums of the late seventies I'm not just saying so because of a misty-eyed nostalgia for my distant leather-clad days of youth spent drunkenly strumming in grungy flats; I'm saying so because it is true, even if that truth is my own and not definitive.

Recorded in Paris in the early Summer of 1979, The Raven was the culmination of a rapid musical evolution the Stranglers had been undergoing since the release of their first two albums, Rattus Norvegicus and No More Heroes, both of which had appeared in 1977. Together, these two albums had contained the whole repertoire of early songs that had put the band at the forefront of the punk / post-punk scene, although the Stranglers were never confidently labelled with either tag, and a good thing too; they were above categorization, a fact that delighted their fans and frustrated music journalists. That early sound was a brash and sometimes brutal mixture of thundering bass-lines, swirling keyboards and contemptuous vocals. The Stranglers were a ferocious and always-abrasive live act.

But with the release in 1978 of their third album, Black and White, the band introduced a wholly more complex sound. The aggressive bass-lines and in-your-face lyrics were still to be found but the breadth of the songs had widened considerably. The album had a white side and a black side (hence the title) and on the latter the imagery and ideas (and band-image) that would come to obsess band and fans alike began to take shape: darkness, death, threat, black... the Meninblack. Black and White was an ambitious and original album and its commercial success spurred the band on to even greater efforts of experimentation with ideas and themes, some serious and some less-so. The first and most subtle flowering of these ideas was The Raven.

Released in September 1979, The Raven sold well (reaching No. 2 in the U.K. Album Chart) and was a refreshingly-sinister breath of foetid air in a year dominated by those bottle-blonde beach-bunnies, The Police. It was also the first Stranglers album to receive consistently positive reviews. The title of the album doesn't really mean too much. The raven motif was a favourite adornment on Viking war-banners and although the first two tracks on this album are Viking-related the rest explore a number of themes that have nothing to do with big sinister birds, although these themes are consistently dark. That said, the bird on the cover does look surprisingly self-important and cheerful. He or she has the look of a bird that knows something we don't!

The difficulty comes when we try to pin this album down. In trying to do so we can get a feel for how frustrated the music journalists of the day were with the band; they were just so difficult to categorize. On listening to The Raven again in order to reset my old memory cells (notoriously unreliable, as they often are) I was struck by how familiar AND unfamiliar the tracks sounded. I found myself noticing musical sequences that had never before pricked my interest, and I've listened to this album on and off for almost thirty years. it still sounds fresh AND slightly sinister and that can only be a tribute to a band that was approaching the zenith of its creativity.

The Tracks

1) Longships - A surreal beginning. Longships is a short instrumental, running in at just over a minute, that sounds like a manic, speeded-up waltz that wouldn't be out of place (slowed down) in an old British horror-movie. Keyboard-ace Dave Greenfield's swirling notes are memorable and will continue to be so throughout the album.

2) The Raven - Something of a band standard, this deceptively-simple track consists of a speedy and hypnotic drum and bass with keyboard and twangy guitar notes dipping in and out as everything slowly builds to a rising synth-crescendo: the raven flies away after having inspired the Norseman to set his world aflame! Bass man JJ Burnel sings the vocal with a breathy impatience.

3) Dead Loss Angeles - A wonderfully sinister tune that is unlikely ever to be used by the L.A. Tourist Office in its commercials. Again it is a play between a gruff bass and a spare, scrunchy keyboard. Less is definitely more. "They're soft marshmallow there, in Dead Loss Angeleeess... ."

4) Ice - I find this song almost impossible to describe... it's just so damned complicated. It has several jarring-but-pleasing key-changes, church organ, Space-Invader-type synth and there's even a bongo drum in there somewhere. Needless to say, it's a song about Hagakure, the code of the Samurai, and in particular, the attractions of ritual disembowelment. Inspired and fantastic.

5) Baroque Bordello - Another multi-layered and multi-paced track that is difficult to describe. It's a musical tour de force, haunting and beautiful, with a poetic lyric about courtesans and the fantasies they inspire and indulge. A brilliant song that is one of my all-time favourites.

6) Nuclear Device (The Wizard of Aus) - The mood lightens somewhat with this thumping and light-hearted fan-favourite. Nuclear Device was a contemptuous dig at the Premier of Queensland, Australia who had set his sights on Aboriginal lands after uranium deposits had been found there. This track was one of two singles released from The Raven.

7) Shah Shah A Go Go - A track inspired by contemporary events. 1979 saw the downfall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini. This song is probably the weakest of the original eleven tracks and was apparently inspired by Nostradamus' Quatrane number 70 that supposedly predicted the Persian switch described above.

8) Don't Bring Harry - A sumptuous, languid and beautiful piano-melody accompanies a mournful lyric about Harry (Heroin). If former front-man Hugh Cornwell's biography is to be believed both he and bassman JJ Burnel were seeing quite a lot of Harry at the time. Don't Bring Harry was also released as part of a four-song EP.

9) Duchess - The most commercial track on the album, Duchess was released as a single a month before the release of the album, reaching No. 12 in the U.K. Singles Chart. It's another irreverent dig, this time at the more dim-witted offspring of the British aristocracy and at their marriage rituals. A staccato drumbeat is accompanied by a busy keyboard and there is also a pleasing amount of post-punk harmonising. The recurring chorus-line is memorable: "And the Rodneys are queuing up... God forbid!" The video that accompanied the single, showing the band in a church and dressed as psychotic choristers, was banned by the BBC on the grounds that it was blasphemous! (For those interested, the offending video is on YouTube, and very tame it is too.)

10) Meninblack - This is the point where it all gets very weird. Munchkins sing about human flesh being porky meat. They are the Meninblack and they've come to eat us. This song has an epic quality to it and it's crazily attractive, hypnotic and very silly. It was the starting point of a journey that would end with the completion of the band's next album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack, where weirdness was the order of the day.

11) Genetix - This was the final track on the original release and is another musically-complex song with more layers than it knows what to do with. The classic bass-line is there along with a complicated guitar-riff, and three quarters of the way through the pace changes to introduce some Gregorian-chant-type vocals and bass-guitar virtuosity that fade into a synth ending.

The remaining tracks were added to the 2001 CD release.

12) Bear Cage - A single released in March 1980, Bear Cage was another superficially-simple oddity that is still strangely pleasing.

13) Fools Rush Out - An instantly forgettable song that was the B-side of the Duchess single.

14) N'Emmenes Pas Harry - In case you haven't guessed, this is the French version of Don't Bring Harry that was recorded for French release (évidemment).

15) Yellowcake UF6 - An unreleased track called Social Secs was put in a tape machine and played backwards. The result was Yellowcake UF6, a track that was the B-side of Nuclear Device. Another oddity that probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

***

Few bands ever have more than one good album in them. The Stranglers, however, had about six, maybe even seven. I know my objectivity is being strained to the limit when I say that but rest assured I'm old enough and cynical enough to be able to resist hyperbole. The odd thing is that while the diversity of, say, their first seven albums is not really in doubt, however much one may dislike them, and many do, all of them have their partisan defenders who declare them to be the best of the lot. That, I suppose, is the best indication of their quality and originality.

But for me it had to be The Raven. I loved all the albums from Rattus in early 77 all the way to the technopoppy Feline in early 83, but the big black bird of 79 marked, I think, the zenith of the band's creative life. The Raven was more subtle than its predecessor and less contrived than its successor. The band too, in 1979, reached a point where the sneering notoriety of the early years comfortably accommodated the controlled virtuosity of which the band had always been capable. Everything came together in The Raven and such a conjunction only ever happens once. Inevitable decline follows. The Stranglers slowly declined throughout the 1980s and the original line-up dissolved at the end of that decade. The band's creative spark had, unfortunately, burned out long before that point. But that spark had been burning at its brightest in 1979 and, ironically, it had been illuminating that darkest of birds, The Raven. The Stranglers had always been masters of the perverse.