THE STRANGLERS BLACK AND WHITE

Sharp, muscular, physical without forgetting to be cerebral, Black and White is probably the Stranglers' hardest work. The most pessimistic. Certainly humor has not suddenly deserted the quartet's camp, but it is more grating there than ever. Full of military images, sweating through all its furrows the paranoia, the fear of the Cold War flaring up for good, the fear technological excesses and nuclear cataclysm, this album would have it all might as well have been called The Apocalypse According to The Stranglers. No redemption on the horizon of its forty minutes, but a salvo of songs flammable and moody that the group throws in the face of a Europe in crisis, especially from a declining, convulsive, nauseated England.