By Rob Wilson
John McClure fancies himself as a bit of a social commentator. His band, Reverend and the Makers, named their debut album bluntly as The State of Things; by album three McClure was still reaching out to those “stuck up into the 9 to 5” and he’s even on TWITTER. Get this: a social commentator that tells things the way they are! A social commentator with four top 20 albums! A social commentator who loves ‘avin it large on a Friday! A social commentator who is ThirtyTwo! A social commentator I’ve grown fucking tired of.
Between you, me and everyone else, I despised the last album they put out. Hated its guts. If John McClure wanted his band to sound like an electro-pop group without a clue between them, he got it bang on. And I mean really bang on. Bulls-fucking-eye: McClure pulled off the most inarticulate impression of Paul Weller possible as his band churned out disposable “anthem” instrumentals behind him. The result? A big load of Nope. Saying the word “Bassline” four times is not a chorus. Over-produced, synthetic, electronics is not good club music. It’s just not. Nope. My entire experience of that album was drowning in Nope.
So why am I here for album four? Because I honestly hoped that if McClure dropped that sneering, whining persona of his, there might be an upward curve on the horizon. And by god, there is! Believe it or not, the tired rhetoric which has plagued McClure’s work recently has evaporated almost completely. Bloody rejoice - he’s sort of accepted his place in the world a little bit! Give him a gold star for his first ever experience of self-awareness. I didn’t hear the phrase “9 to 5” once on ThirtyTwo, so that alone is progress for me. But wait, what’s that? Oh great, one track in and McClure refers to the clitoris as a “detonator”. The sound of laughter erupts from my mouth. He wants to take a girl somewhere and set off her detonator. Lovely. Is ThirtyTwo going to be an entire album of John McClure’s sperm leaking through my headphones? Oh god. Nope. More Nope. Please, John, give me the “b-b-b-basslines” and talk to me some more about that thing Paul Weller told everyone else thirty years ago. I take it all back. I’m almost sorry.
What’s worse is that McClure still can’t use metaphors properly, so when he refers to that girl’s clitoris as a “detonator” in the opening track, it’s just plain fucking creepy. McClure is 32 - the album name tells us so because he’s subtle like that - and he’s calling a clitoris a detonator. Let that sink in. Line up, ladies. Ladies? No ladies? Oh, just one Lady? Oh, no, you’re gone too.
And further into this whirlwind of disappointing sex is ‘I Spy’, which is yet another platform for John McClure’s all too palpable ineptitude with the usage of metaphors. Bad Pulp vibes all over the place. I’m pretty sure we’re spoken to by McClure while he’s on all fours at the feet of a so-called “pussycat” in a dominatrix costume. For god’s sake. My skin really isn’t crawling at all, John. Thanks for that.
Thankfully, for everyone’s sakes, McClure drops the most disturbing act of 2014 so far for the ska-tinged ‘The Devil’s Radio’. And you know what, McClure’s metaphors improve a smidge, but only a smidge. “Gossip is the Devil’s radio” apparently. Oh, and gossip takes place in lots of places apparently. John’s temporarily back on the whole social commentary thing here. The worst thing about McClure’s social commentary is that he thinks talking about really unimportant and relatively harmless topics is interesting. By dropping the desire to be a beacon of representation for the working class public, John McClure has exposed a crippling fact: he’s a boring fuck. Gossip at the school playground is not the best topic McClure could have gone for here, let’s be honest. It’s gossip. In other words: harmless shit made to fill pages of shit magazines made to fill the tables in waiting rooms. And, John, if you care enough about inane gossip to write a whole song about it, at least justify your decision with some power. Don’t just whine through your nose for 8 bars and call it a refrain – you made that mistake last time. Thankfully, ‘The Devil’s Radio’ is the last time we hear that social commentator speak, and we enter the realm of John McClure’s Songs About Nothing. Like Radio 2 on a Sunday lunch time, but with beer and pills. At least it’s better than having his sperm injected into my brain.
And that’s just the problem with the entire album: it doesn’t do anything. It tries hard to stay between the lines of accessibility and appeal that it actually becomes frozen there, like some homogeneous, sickly gloop that can’t move its arms. Seriously, a huge shout out to Reverend and the Makers for making an album that’s managed to be more boring and inoffensive than Susan Boyle’s cover album thingy. This problem really comes to a head on the ironically titled ‘Happy Song’: there’s an instrumental plucked from the back end of a Lily Allen album and McClure’s whining the word “Why” for a second time – it’s out of the right ear before the left ear has processed it. But for the laughter-inducing ‘Detonator’ and the downright disturbing ‘I Spy’, this album got next to no reaction out of me. Not even the tap of a foot. There are five whole brains in Reverend and the Makers and not one of them managed to interest me more than once in about 40 minutes. Five whole people with lives, beliefs, dreams, hopes, tragedies and personal histories to draw from couldn’t make me share their desires. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s just upsetting.
Actually, I may have to row back all the way to the boathouse on that, just. ‘Nostalgia’ is earnest in its message – John wants the past back - but the imagery is simply all wrong. You see, another problem I have is that not one track on this album sounds like five people were involved. The instrumentals are so fucking thin: they’re as robotic as Kraftwerk’s drum tracking on The Man Machine but without the minimal, pioneering edge, and they’re sucked of all life by whoever’s been put in charge of the post-production. If you want to tell everyone you’re yearning for the past then give us a soppy chord with a cement mixer full of reverb poured on it, or at the very least gives us a clip of a crying baby. Don’t open the track up like you’re strutting down the side of the street like a Liam Gallagher parody (because we already know you are one, John).
Okay, okay. Some positives and redeeming features before I go. Don’t want to sound like even more of a prick now, do I? ‘Time’ is the standout. No question. John’s desires to create “anthems” the world can dance around to are half-realised here. “Don’t you wanna go outside in the sunshine sometimes?” Yeah, John, I do. I’ve got a Vitamin D deficiency that needs sorting. Jesus, you’ve actually got me interested in this. The Reverend has a sense of conviction this time, and I like it. ‘Time’ actually has a powerful stomp. Granted, it’s still a bit naff, with most of the individual sections continually fighting against being drowned in yet another mixing mess, but an album full of ‘Time’ would have more than sufficed.
Because of ‘Time’ alone, ThirtyTwo is only a mini-disaster. A burglary and not a murder. It wasn’t @Revernd_Makers either. John is no longer obsessed with being the peoples’ champion. I’ve gone from spitting acid to simply being a little bit bored. It’s impossible for me to truly hate the album because of how much it kills my passion for all things.
So, in a way, you have to hand it to Reverend and the Makers, they sure know how to make albums which slowly blend into uneventful mulch. It’s odd really; even when McClure steps down from his soapbox he always strikes me as a man with an opinion on something. But other than his feelings about inane gossip and other peoples’ relationships (‘Your Girl’) I’m not sure what McClure really wanted to say on ThirtyTwo. Maybe he just struggles to articulate his feelings in more than 140 characters nowadays? Twitter’s a dangerous thing, you know.
