Down In The Sewer: Falling/Down In The Sewer/Trying To Get Out Again/Rats Rally
Choosey Susie
Go Buddy Go
Peasant In The Big Shitty (Live)
UK repackaged reissue of 1977 album, includes new artwork with extensive sleeve notes & previously unseen photos. 12 tracks including three bonus tracks, 'Choosey Susie', 'Go Buddy Go', 'Peasant In The Big Shitty' (... more »Live).« less
UK repackaged reissue of 1977 album, includes new artwork with extensive sleeve notes & previously unseen photos. 12 tracks including three bonus tracks, 'Choosey Susie', 'Go Buddy Go', 'Peasant In The Big Shitty' (Live).
"My room mate in college stole this from our school radio station. He never listened to it but I did. I immediately fell in love with it and played it all the time. A friend of mine stopped by one day and we were listening to it and my roomie asked him, "Do you like it?" He said he did and my roomie gave it to him. I was pretty pissed off but I went out and bought it myself and have listened to a lot of Stranglers since but this is the best one in my opinion. Great stuff!"
Bastards and Rats...the birth...
P. T. Ostiguy | MA | 06/30/2009
(5 out of 5 stars)
"Snarled, pungent, puke stained intellectuals thrown into a monster cage with nary an inclination as to there beginning impact. That best describes this gnarled opener of a career spanning a solid decades worth of solid contributions whose leaders where few and far between. The comfort of hearing this album lay in its seemingly unabashed need to find excuses for itself, throwing out dirt like gold and knowing that its speed is kept like a run through sand. That doesn't sound too inviting...part bar/punk album and part flourishing of musical diversity, "Rattus Norvegicus" is a prime example of an undeserving of category...the very goal, I perceive, of the band itself. Never stymied by image, just simply there, The Stranglers carved a gentle niche' into a musical landscape inhabited by posers and little children. It's here, at the very seemingly real deaths of there own childhood, did the record spin and history made. "Down in the Sewer", with its ubber climax of an organ solo will most assuredly be rediscovered by some hipster who will inevitably either A: slap it onto a movie trailer or B: do it justice and include it at the closer of a really well written crime story... Do yourself a favor, and go get "Ugly"."
Prog punk!
Frank Gorshin | Missouri | 02/14/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"The Stranglers were actually really good musicians, unlike most of the punk crowd. You can tell they're dumbing it down for the kids, but with smirk. Actually very clever and biting, like a hard-edged, intellectual Doors that wants your wallet."
Punk, not punk, art punk who cares...is a masterpiece!
J. J. Castro | N.J. | 05/24/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This album, along with No More Heroes, Black & White and a bit later The Raven had a profound impact among our group of friends. Let me explain.
Being young adolescents by the end of the seventies we were impressed by the sounds coming (specially) from the New York and UK punk scenes. Yes, endless listening sessions enjoying what we found to be the music and the approach to art that we felt was right on time. Suicide, Patty Smith, Television were kind of the arty side for for us while The Ramones,The Voidoids, The Damned, obviously The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, Avengers among many others ensured the party. But The Stranglers were different.
They could be complex, smart, and so threatening and obscure, yet powerful, that in a way it proposed quite a trip.
And maybe the explanation was that all four had a musical training or background that was way beyond the normal DIY "You don't need to know how to play" of the time, they concocted a professional sound without sacrificing the harsh edge they wanted. The mixing was also different: having the bass (and what a bass!) on top of the mix, the swirling, virtuoso organ and synth sounds were some were between a progressive, psychedelic (a bit Doors sounding in this record) and the dreamy and surreal, an impeccable straight, dry sounding, yet inventive drumming and an ever busy chilling guitar mostly at the back that was opposed to the normal fat driven guitars that characterized the sound of punk rock.
To complete the unusual package here we had a band that brought a rat as symbol and if you look carefully at the albums cover you'll discover another future icon of them: a meninblack.
try it...this was my first introduction to them, the one that got us hooked and made us embraced The Stranglers as "our" band and seeded the strong desire to pick up and instrument and just be yourself, that youc could do whatever you wanted and destroy al preconceptions, a work that we felt it had to be followed, so I went out to look from were I could get a bass from..."