It would take something fairly forceful, and a whole bucket of belief in whatever that may be, to promote a new band who have shared history with the Arctic Monkeys to not use that fact as said band’s launch pad into the wide public consciousness. But the Reverend (aka John McClure) is nothing if not forceful. Self belief has rarely seemed so boggle-eyed – if the band bombs (though don’t think for a moment that he’s actually prepared for that possibility) there’s always motivational videos, hypnosis or ranting and raving at passing non-believers on rainy street corners in Sheffield to fall back on. And if he tells you he’s Muhammad Ali, you just smile and nod, ok? In his head he can remember every KO. And right here right now, when he’s raving, he believes himself to be a modern day prophet, he’s just telling it like it is and sees their debut ‘The State Of Things’ more as documentary disco than a straight-up bolshy pop album, placing himself and The Makers up in that social realism bracket with Bloc Party, Hard-Fi and The Streets, taking off their heads and dancing all the way to the revolution with the trophies.
The reality of ‘things’ is all much plainer however. The maturity of his lyrics rarely match the rhetoric he whips up with them, being almost too to-the-point, too blunt, shouting any poetic twists out of the door (“…the woman who stands by her fella/despite the bruises brought on by the Stella” – fair, maybe, but a building brick rhyme and a cliché also). But though our head reasons against it throughout, they pull our heart in early with riotous warehouse party static keeping the momentum ticking over and our pulse racing. It’s mid-90s moog big-beat grooves, Lo Fidelity Allstar spark-flying attitude verging on baggy euphoria, tied up with that rough, rolling storytelling patented by Alex Turner (though, as Wikipedia informs us, Turner based much of his act on McClure).
The multi-protagonist ‘Bandits’ runs at a cut-throat pace and is pretty cool (although The Rakes pulled it off better with ‘Suspicious Eyes’), ‘18-30’ makes a reasonable go of the same old shameful Brits abroad tale (but will never top ‘Girls & Boys’) and ‘What The Milkman Saw’ is a Rapture on the Inspiral Carpets funk belter let down a little only by its title and humour, as with much on here in fact. So very nearly there so very many times. But to its credit this album does carry ‘Heavyweight Champion Of The World’, like a complus mentus Happy Mondays torching the city walls with Radio 4 egging them on and the Stereo MCs setting up a makeshift soundsystem, it’s an absolute bloody triumph. Unlike band like the Arctic Monkeys and Hard-Fi who’s task becomes all the more complex when they’re forced away from their initial inspiration, Reverend & The Makers can only get better with life experience, so here’s looking forward to album number 2. Until then, grab yourself a glow stick, this one’s still a lot of fun.