Sheffield’s making an awful lot of popular noises these days – the indie kids who go to clubs and yet never sweat are name-checking Long Blondes, a certain Jarvis Cocker is back and is curating Meltdown…then there are those Arctic Monkey fellers – I hear they’re doing pretty well. And now Reverend & The Makers (aka Jon McClure - the Reverend - and his band) giving baggy beats a dollop of drollish South Yorkshire vowels with ‘Heavyweight Champion of the World’.
It’s got the same lyrical earthiness of former tourmates, Arctic Monkeys, but without the acidic contempt that you can wring out of an Alex Turner line. Here McClure centres more on soul-numbing mundanity of modern life and missed chances to have done it all differently. And instead of the scratchy-edged guitars of the Monkeys, here it’s more of a synth-funk throwback to Madchester. If Ian Brown were made a honorary Pet Shop Boy he’d want to make records like this.
The B-Sides carry on this dual theme of escapism/mundanity of the working week, albeit without the same aplomb as the lead track ’18-30’ is a slightly-too-samey and less exuberant ode to escaping British routine to a booze-addled package holiday. And while a nice little curio, I can’t see why you’d want to listen to ‘The Last Resort’, a minute-long reading alongside live cohort, John Cooper Clark, more than once.
‘Heavyweight Champion of the World’ is out now on Wall Of Sound as a download. It received a physical release on May 28.
