Album review: Reverend and the Makers

Published on Sunday 19 July 2009 19:58

REVEREND & THE MAKERS: A FRENCH KISS IN THE CHAOS WALL OF SOUND, £11.74

THE "Reverend" Jon McClure – so-called because he is always sermonising about something – was merely a face on the Sheffield music scene until a certain up-and-coming band called Arctic Monkeys cited him as a mentor figure (and chose his brother Chris as the smoking cover star of their debut album).

Now, his reputation as a mouthy so-and-so precedes him, and somewhat overshadows his band, the Makers. Although unlike, say, the Gallaghers, McClure has no desire to sound off for the sake of it, preferring to use his newfound national platform to rail against racism, have a go at the government and flex his muscles as an all-round agitator.

To that end, McClure has set up the Instigate Debate project, along with ex-Libertine Carl Barat, as a vehicle to encourage young people to hold politicians to account and at least attempt a sophisticated level of discussion. In comparison with his more reticent peers, McClure gives the impression that he is permanently in reception, hoping to get that Question Time gig. At one point on this album, he even (playfully?) asks "burning issue – why didn't you phone?"

But these are tough times for politicised pop stars. Musicians who dare to speak out on, y'know, issues and stuff are regularly treated with suspicion, cynicism, even outright derision, and McClure is often dismissed as a self-serving rent-a-gob, when his only crime is making mediocre records in generic whiny northern indie style.

This second Makers' album comes hot on the heels of the debut album by McClure's other project, Mongrel – an agit-indie supergroup featuring Babyshambles bassist Drew McConnell, former Arctic Monkey Andy Nicholson and rapper Lowkey in the line-up – and was, for a brief time, to have been his final musical utterance, after he announced his retirement late last year, via the medium of mixed metaphor. "I feel like a sore thumb in a piranha pool in this industry," he declared. But it seems his work here is not yet done, and there are more averagely decent indie albums to be made.

Current single Silence Is Talking at least sticks in the head with its punchy brass hook, persistent rumbling bass and the vague sniff of eastern promise. It's the kind of musical mishmash that Kasabian are very keen on promoting as "ground-breaking", though it is actually the lyric about deception and obfuscation which sounds prescient in the light of the whole MPs expenses row.

Hidden Persuaders, a chiming indie pop track with retro horns, puts the boot into the supposed benefits of consumer choice with one of the album's more eloquent hooklines: "You're free to do as we tell you, and you're free to do it today."

But while McClure is conversant with the hot topics of the day, he is stuck in the 1990s when it comes to music. Numerous tracks feel like cast-offs from the Madchester era. The garage pop swirl of the clichd drug anthem Professor Pickles recalls Inspiral Carpets channelling Joe Meek and other bad trip sonic effects.

From requesting "something to help me forget", he moves on to ditching the prescribed medication on comedown ballad Long Long Time: "I didn't take my pills today, wanted to see what would have happened if I didn't worry and I let it drift away, so I could melt in the sunshine" (pronounced "soonshine" with typical Liam Gallagher intonation).

Following this druggy interlude, he's back at the hustings. No Soap In A Dirty War builds from a reflective start into a serviceable defiant singalong of disaffection and rebellion: "I don't want to die in the same hole I was born."

Manifesto/People Shapers is the album's most polemical song, sticking it first to the BNP ("there ain't no grey man can tell me white is black") with a Velvet Underground-like psychedelic cacophony before widening the line of fire to include the media and a neat rebuff to McClure's own critics – "since when did it get pass to be having a say?"

The closing Hard Time For Dreamers is a tentative call to arms, an appeal for solidarity in times of trial, although it is not clear if its list of worst case scenarios – "when my wallet's looking thin or if the Tories got back in, and if sea levels should rise and Sheffield's on the coastline" – is meant to be tongue-in-cheek or entirely earnest.

One thing that is more certain, however, is that if McClure seriously wants to engage, inspire and mobilise a wider audience, he will need to reel them in with better songs than these.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

New York Dolls

The Garage, Glasgow, tonight

The original trash rock reprobates can still conjure up a dumb old garage punk riot in their dotage, even though only two original members – the louche David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain – have made it this far. Where once they shocked, now they are affectionately regarded as elder rock'n'roll statesmen.

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