A Certain Ratio - Change The Station (1996/2016)

Two reissues from the Manchester veterans track the progress of their post-punk/disco fusions into the 1990s and 2000s—an uneven path, but their freewheeling energy still charms.

“My heart was just an open sore/Which you picked at ’til it was raw/It bled away my existence/Shriveled under your insistence.” Who writes lyrics like these? Nihilist poets, emo singers, hyperliterate teenagers, sure—but a disco group? Dance music has often addressed themes of alienation, pain, and loss, but rarely has a band been both as enticingly funky and harrowingly bleak as Manchester’s A Certain Ratio. In their first decade, ACR made some of the most seminal yet underrated post-punk, avant-pop, and tweaked funk of an era filled with hybrid explorations. Early tracks like “Knife Slits Water” and “Do the Du” ruthlessly deconstructed the pleasures of the flesh while simultaneously urging listeners to succumb to them. Part of the fun remains in trying to decide if ACR were, at heart, party boys who couldn’t get out of their heads or overburdened cultural theorists looking for an escape hatch. As they moved into the 1980s, this binary juxtaposition would fall away in favor of a more expansive approach to dance music: brainy, jazzy, adventurous, yet keenly aware of exhilarating developments in the Top 40.

The group had intimate ties to their hometown’s “Madchester” scene, a community of musicians and DJs clustered around Factory Records and its legendary nightclub, the Haçienda. Alongside fellow Mancunians New Order and the Happy Mondays as well as Leeds’ Gang of Four and Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, ACR were a historic example of the spontaneous groupthink Brian Eno dubbed “scenius.” These artists exemplified the rushing development from punk’s snotty three-chord “fuck you”s into the nuanced, multifaceted expressions that defined underground music in the ’80s.

By 1996, the dance music revolution that ACR & co. once anticipated had come to fruition beyond anyone’s expectations. House, techno, ambient, downtempo, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, IDM, and their various subgenres (not to mention hip-hop) had exploded across the globe. During their late-1970s/early-’80s peak, ACR’s output was neck and neck with historic releases like Kraftwerk’s Computer World, the Upsetters’ Blackboard Jungle Vol. 1, and Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” But now the funky futurism of the ’80s sounded quaint compared to the blink-and-you-missed it developments in Berlin, London, Detroit, and New York. Change the Station was the band’s first effort in five years—an eternity for dance music at that time. In the meantime, artists as game-changing as Björk, Aphex Twin, Goldie, Underground Resistance, and Basic Channel had all brazenly recalibrated dance music’s DNA.