Isolationist, misanthropic and cantankerous, New Wave survivors, the Stranglers were never a band known for ostentatious displays of affection, at least not to music journalists. However, 1981's conceptual La Folie (roughly translated as "madness") has become known in band circles as the Stranglers' "love" album. Typically, these were no ordinary chansons d'amour. Songs of faith, familial strife, devotion and dependency--spanning religion, celebrity obsession, lust, death and drugs--the nearest the album got to being superficially palatable was on the gorgeous, harpsichord-strewn "Golden Brown" (ex-drug offence jail bird Hugh Cornwell's paeon to the seduction of heroin) and the chilled-out title track, six sultry minutes of JJ Burnel reciting--entirely in French--the true story of a Paris-based student who murdered and ate his girlfriend. The Raven aside, La Folie found the Stranglers at their most instrumentally dextrous and melodically inventive; Burnel's nomadic bass lines, the discordant Four Freshmen harmonies on "It Only Takes Two To Tango", Cornwell's barb at the commercialised martyrdom of deceased pop stars on the waspish "Everybody Loves You When You're Dead" ("the fans will love you when your alive but the wreaths are laid by the rest instead"). There are some great should-have-been singles too, such as "Non Stop Nun" ("enlisted Sister, knows her mister, never two-times with the rest of the clan") with its cheesy organ licks, and the perky, Page 3 ogling synth pop of "Pin Up". Even the bonus tracks are excellent--"Strange Little Girl" (a Top 10 hit and a song covered by Tori Amos) and its even better picnic-jazz B-side, the Hot Club De Paris pastiche "Cruel Garden". La Folie is easily the most underrated album from Britain's most underrated band. --Kevin Maidment
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