A Certain Ratio - To Each...
#209
May 1981
A Certain Ratio
To Each…
Genre: Self-Indulgent Martin Hannet. Hey! It’s an oxymoron!
2.5 out of 5
Why? Why is the first track called “Felch”? Why does the world need that? At least “Stinkfist” was good.
Employing Martin Hannett and then going for that dark and gloomy Joy Division idiom makes sense, I guess.
Had there not been a few random vocals here and there I might have fought to keep this off. As great as Throbbing Gristle could be, this is not.
An album that dares you to listen to it and then dares you to say something nice about it.
Ok, I’m being unfairly harsh. There are beats on this and a bassist who really plucks. And everything around it…reminds me of a story…
I was in a parody punk band in college. Sophomore year. I played cardboard boxes. The guitarist had never picked one up before. We had two singers. A male and female. She named the band, “Yeast Infection”.
We somehow got a gig. At a run down bar in midtown (?”) called The Dive. We frequented it a couple times and the owner/proprietor was crazy and he lets us have a gig.
We FILLED that place with friends. We bought $0.25 records and put masking tape on the titles and handed them out as if our own.
I had a song I had written based on something a friend had heard from a deranged person on the street corner.
“I’m an artist! You don’t believe me? I’ll draw on your fucking face!!”
It turned it into a punk/country thing.
Singing that dirge was one of the greatest moments of my young life.
But that’s not what this story is about.
It’s about the owner of the bar who came up on stage with us, uninvited, to blow his trumpet during that song and it was fucking weird, man.
We closed with the punk version of “B-I-N-G-O”.
It was a riot.
I was hooked. I wanted to be in a band ever since then. I made that dream come true 15 years later.
I’ll tell that story again cuz I kind of wasted it on this record.
But this record reminds me of that. Like, there’s a fucking guy with a trumpet who just feels compelled to get up while the musicians are playing and add his nonsense.
I will say that the last 12 minute track is a bit hypnotic but, ultimately, is an exercise in monotony.
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