Reverend and The Makers have forged a career out of throwing curveballs. At a time when all anyone associated the Steel City music scene with was just how good you looked on the dance floor, McClure and his posse were instead firing off gritty, kitchen sink narratives to electro beats and industrial grooves, sneering social commentary that placed them nearer The Streets than their Artic Monkeys drinking buddies.
But if their breakthrough sound was one of a John Osborne play pushing into future soundscapes, here they fully acknowledge the past with echo’s of Ray Davis’s late sixties attempts to capture the soul of small town England and occasional forays into Beatle-esque acid flash psychedelia plus their own trademark sound which often sounds like the distant echo of their home city’s industrial past.
Already being hailed as the band’s masterpiece it manages to draw from not only from their own career path but is able to reference previous decades as easily as it looks into a bright, new musical horizon.
Maybe the curveball they have thrown here is to stop throwing curveballs and settled down to accept that they don’t have to be the mavericks anymore and in doing so have given themselves a lot more freedom to explore the bands musical potential. And the result is nothing short of brilliant.
