When you consider A Certain Ratio’s ample influence on some of the 21st century’s best and brightest, it’s easy to imagine the late Factory Records label head (and incorrigible self-mythologist) Tony Wilson muttering a sly ‘I told you so’. Perhaps most famously, they’re favourites of LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, who cites them as a blueprint for his pummelling, eclectic dance-rock. It’s fitting that somebody with such pronounced magpie tendencies should love a band who, since their earliest days, have consciously built on the work of others with dazzling creativity.
Even their signature song is a cover version. 1980’s brilliant ‘Shack Up’ took a funky celebration of cohabitation by the obscure Banbarra and lit a blazing fire under it, alchemising its swaying snaky groove into a rickety, raw-boned indie disco barnstormer. Now, thirteen albums into a marathon career, It All Comes Down to This sees the band – with producer Dan Carey in tow – exploring new frontiers of genre and mood by dipping into more styles than you can rattle a cowbell at.
ACR step outside our expectations as soon as the album kicks off with ‘All Comes Down to This’. Even as the bassline bobs along cheekily and Donald Johnson’s drums clatter away, betraying exactly why the Ratio take pride of place in Murphy’s vast record collection, there are few traces of their trademark funk here. Its combination of cryptic lyrics and spiky pop has more in common with post-punk riddle-masters Wire than anything pulled from the George Clinton playbook.
But there’s one band which they seem to invite more comparisons to than any other. Their status as ‘Manchester’s answer to Talking Heads’ is such that urban folklore suggests the New York new wavers shifted their sound directly because of them, and they’ve paid their transatlantic cousins more direct tribute in the past.
The claustrophobically humid demo cover of ‘Houses in Motion’ which ACR unearthed a few years ago as good as matches the original’s brain-bending primal thrill, with Jez Kerr’s guide vocal even more clammy and reticent than Byrne’s. But on It All Comes Down to This, we hear the boys mining Remain in Light’s golden vein of blaring brass and slinky bass for their own compositions.
Pulsing with the same underplayed swagger as that album’s ‘Seen and Not Seen’, ‘We All Need’ deploys hooks left and right to cut swathes through the dark, dense atmosphere. Then you’ve got the shadowy ‘Bitten by a Lizard’, enticing you in with woozy, unsettling Boards of Canada synths until percussive reptilian rattles whip up a hallucinatory heat haze of sound.
Anyone who remembers original vocalist Simon Topping and his dour whalesong groan will know that, from the very beginning, ACR have dared to be much more brooding than your usual party music. Even so, there are moments here of charming playfulness that gleam all the brighter for the gloom that surrounds them.
‘Surfer Ticket’, for instance, makes for one of the moodiest things on the record. With its references to war, squalor, methamphetamine, and the continued usurpation of human creativity by computers, its glitchy techno setting flickers and fuzzes like a hard drive backing up. This makes the lyrics’ completely unexpected tweaking of a Bruce Forsyth catchphrase (‘nice to see you die, to see you die nice’) all the more delightful.
But there are plenty more upbeat numbers, too, and it’s these which make it clear why ACR mean so much to so many. ‘Keep It Real’ sees them easing back into their classic dancefloor mode, Martin Moscrop’s spiky guitar scritch-scratching out a jerky rhythm while Kerr’s playground-taunt delivery radiates natural, unshowy confidence. Later on, the empowering ‘Out From Under’ – which, in the best way possible, makes them sound like Franz Ferdinand’s dads – realises its dancing-as-liberation metaphor through nagging disco licks, seizing your feet and refusing to let go.
Other tracks veer away from their classic style to provide some of the record’s biggest surprises. The punchy, longing ‘God Knows’ gives us a startling flash of the mainstream 80s megastars the band could’ve been. Its pastel-coloured Miami Vice yacht-pop is uplifting enough to invert the cynical lyrics (‘God knows what love is / God knows we need it’) into a rallying cry for togetherness.
More surprising still is ‘Estate Kings’. It’s another offering which sets us up in Remain in Light mode, all scrolling rolling funk and big discordant trumpet blasts, but in place of Talking Heads’ destabilising existential dread we get an affectionate tribute to a comfortable-enough youth spent in 1970s Britain. Where their last album boasted ‘SAMO’, a joyful ode to Jean-Michel Basquiat, here we find Johnson* paying his respects to the closer-to-home pop icons of Chopper bikes and Ariel soap powder.
Coming from a less adventurous band, this could all smack of parochial staleness. But when the art-school idiom A Certain Ratio work in so often valourises grit and glamour, it’s a real treat (especially for any Half Man Half Biscuit fans) to hear Johnson declare, ‘In my World of Sport, Dickie Davies is king’. More than a nostalgia trip, it’s a gentle shot against elitism and a heart-warming affirmation of music’s culture-crossing power.
In fact, it’s ‘Estate Kings’ which ties together the whole thesis of the album. It All Comes Down to This shows ACR, a band whose propensity for experimentalism has occasionally skirted unapproachability, accepting that their status as underground icons means they’re long past posturing for its own sake. It’s the sound of three titans making the music they love whether we expect it of them or not, and demonstrating that a kick back into relaxed, unselfconscious fun can make a band more adventurous, not less.
Closer ‘Dorothy Says’ caps the album off with a shining example of this anything-goes approach. With the lads setting the great Dorothy Parker’s witticisms over a slab of chiming, mewing jangle pop, there’s no big flashy showstopper here. It carries the more trepidatious feeling of a slow new dawn, taking the album’s rueful, resilient sensibility and pointing it towards the future. The times may be grim, but as Kerr quotes, ‘you might as well live’.
*Review originally stated that Jez Kerr was the vocalist on ‘Estate Kings’. This has been corrected.
It All Comes Down to This is out now via Mute – order via Bandcamp
Find out more about A Certain Ratio on their official website
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Review by Poppy Bristow
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