Everything’s in its right place. But then it would be wouldn’t it, it’s screwed down. And The Rain Band don’t have a screwdriver. We have no evidence to say they’d know how to use it even if they did. This debut album only goes on to confirm what’s already been hinted at with their preceding singles and gigs. And that is that although they approach their victim (Manchester’s revered and danceable musical output of the ‘80s) with bulbous adrenaline coursing through their veins, they lose their nerve before they get there and stand watching like dribbling, paralysed voyeurs. They approach from an intriguing handful of angles too, but it’s the same each time. The architectural equivalent of this album is seeing the Eiffel Tower in all its glory, pissing off back to Blackpool and sticking a similar half-hearted effort up facing the North Sea to entice testosterone ‘n’ Stella drenched stag-parties into the sullied strip clubs littering the manky seafront below. Mmm, you got the style.
Except style was never the primary concern of the baggy brigade was it. There was undoubtedly some kind of self-consciousness in their presentation, but it was all about the feeling, the rhythm, the communal high. One out of three doesn’t really make the grade though. And that they have rhythm means little when they’ve essentially taken it without asking, in which case it’s not really theirs at all. Reaching the communal high seems an impossibility too when there’s too high a sense of self-worth. Ian Brown might have known he was special back in the day, but he knew the people in front of him were too, maybe more so. That kind of depth would probably seem dizzying to them.
You spend half of first track, the New Order going on Monaco album-filler ‘Knee Deep and Down’, urging them up on to that next level which never comes. And for all the Hooky bass-lines that continue to pad out the record satisfactorily they just never go where they should in the end. In a break from the norm, ‘Easy Rider’ comes on all a bit INXS, which wouldn’t be a bad thing had they remembered to pack a chorus. ‘Fist of Fury’, ‘Lucifer’ and especially ‘Into The Light’ are pure Happy Mondays homages, but like a banknote forged on a Fisher-price desktop printer it’d only fool a foreigner, and a stupid one at that. ‘Ruins and Remains’ nicks the ‘Thriller’ bass-line and tries to merge it with ‘Wrote For Luck’. It’s about as lucky as a trampled two-leaf clover. Things could have been different, you feel, if only they’d wanted to step out the box, or at least move things around.