The Stranglers – [Album]

Let's hear a cheer for being playfully malign! The Stranglers had been basically out of commission for the better part of a decade (sure – they could still pull a crowd, but they were losing creative steam quickly after issuing their Coup De Grace in 1998) or on the 'Memory Lane' circuit at most but now – with a dark but giddy spring in their step – The Stranglers are back on their game with their seventeenth full-length album, Giants.

Right from the beginning, the band's buoyantly antagonistic sense of humor is apparent on this album, from guts to garters:

1. Playing with the image of being “well-hung,” the album cover (which has been altered for the album's North American release) features all four band members hanged by the neck on a schoolyard swing set.
2. Song titles including “Freedom Is Insane,” “My Fickle Resolve” and “Time Was Once On My Side” all feature the sort of gallows humor which won the band its core audience as early as 1977, and returns renewed here.
3. While the band could easily have grown dour and dismal playing with the sounds and images they have for the last thirty-five years, Giants starts with a fantastically high energy level which the band maintains throughout this ten-track run-time.

Those constants guarantee that Giants will both get and keep listeners excited, but the album offers more than just the basics. Rather, The Stranglers twist conventions at every turn here; for example, they take the rock-y R&B tone that The Stones have been trading in since “returning” with Bridges To Babylon and distort it just enough to make it both their own and fresh with that excitement. A perfect example of what the band has done would be the title track off Giants; there, guitarist Baz Warne takes a stock Keith Richards rhythm figure and inserts a single minor chord. It's simple, but that change completely re-casts the song an makes it into a much darker and more desperate exercise. It also proves to perfectly suit/match the dissenting political commentary of the song (see lines like “Once there were giants walking amongst us/ Now I have to deal with little men with little hearts/ I'm glad my father's not here to see/ What happens to men like him/ They fought the battles these dwarves can only talk about”) and The Stranglers find that they have an all-new breed of hit on their hands: classic in form but distinctly post-modern in expression.

Giants continues to amaze as it further fleshes out the form first implied by its title track. On “Boom Boom,” for example, the band plays a perfect kiss-off card (“There's a joke in there somewhere that's meant for you”) set against a perfectly formulaic-sounding pop number one might expect to hear from Blur, while “Time Was Once On My Side” crosses angry verse presentations with poppy choruses and ends up offering the epitome of ironic alternative genius to listeners by song's end. All pulled together, the album ends up playing like a perfectly subversive slab of anti-pop; it's refreshing and bad-natured all at the same time and, once listeners get on board with it, they'll stay with it until the record ends because it's just so much malicious fun.

Artist:
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Album:
Giants is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .

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