Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 17/09/07
Label: Wall of Sound

In his short but rapidly accelerating career, 25-year-old Sheffield native Jon McClure has become almost as well known for his hilariously hubristic pronouncements as for his band's music, suggesting that he's the reincarnation of Bob Marley and comparing himself to Ginsberg, Dylan and Plato. Such comical claims might seem peripheral to any band's music, but swagger is crucial to The Makers' picture, since The Rev is clearly stepping into shoes worn not by any one of his acknowledged heroes - Marley, Lennon and Strummer - but by two other quasi-gnomic, northern gobshites, Liam Gallagher and Ian Brown.

Despite the barrelling, synth-stoked insistence of The Makers' debut album, it's so transparently in debt to Monkey Man's groove-based, indie-dance anthems that he might want to think about changing the locks on his studio door. So might those other northern champions of electro-propelled, retro-rock tuneage, Kasabian, whose remixer, Jagz Kooner produced The Makers' debut. In terms of safe-bet, rock orthodoxy, you don't get much more safe-bet a cross-pollination than Reverend And The Makers.

Every note of "The State Of Things" rings out with chummy, beered-up, lad-pleasing potential - generous servings of The Stone Roses/Ian Brown with dashes of Happy Mondays, The Verve and Stereo MC's. Nothing hugely wrong with that, especially when you consider how fundamentally they changed the landscape of British music, but that was then. When Happy Mondays delivered "Bummed", The Rev was all of seven-years-old.

Much has been made of McClure's mentoring of the young Alex Turner, who co-wrote three songs on the album (returning the favour for McClure's writing of Arctic Monkeys' "Yellow Bricks") and the two have often been compared. True, McClure does have a way with words - domestic violence (the title track), nine-to-five drudgery ("The Machine"), teenage pregnancy ("He Said He Loved Me") and cross-cultural relationships in an increasingly divided Britain ("Sundown On The Empire") all get a look in via his direct and unforced rhyming couplets, their poignancy underlined by the very ordinariness of their subject matter.

It's a double shame, then, that the music is stuck fast in a time warp. A few bits of woogly electronica, some swooshing synths and a dash of dub can't disguise the fact that The Reverend and his disciples fell deeply in love when they heard "The Stone Roses" and "Connected" and have never quite recovered. It's a bafflingly backward-looking record from a band so young, on their first outing and it's hard to imagine that sounding like Kasabian's mellower second cousins was ever the game plan. If this is the state of things, then frankly, we're in trouble.

    by Sharon O'Connell