aaamusic | On 17, Jun 2012

It would be so very easy to be cynical about this album. Two albums in and Jon “The Reverend” McClure doesn’t so much risk killing his career with this electronic influenced “dance” album as recognise that his band never quite got the recognition they were primed for, listens to the last Chase and Status record and thinks “Well, if that’s what the kids are into these days…” This is a self-consciously Club oriented record, when the tracks aren’t built from four to the floor, hands in the air disco beats they’re dipping their toes into the murky waters of Dubstep. Only the odd slabs of guitar, McClure’s unmistakeable honk of a voice and blunt, hectoring lyrics stop this from sounding completely out of place with the rest of The Maker’s back catalogue. The most surprising thing is, given how horrific the whole idea sounds on paper, is how not bad the album is. While this could have been as embarrassing as your mum revealing a hitherto unknown appreciation for Pitbull it’s actually pretty damn good in places, it’s still not great but it’s far from awful, and finds McClure’s mob actually approaching something close to relevancy, something thought to be lost after Favourite Worst Nightmare kicked the expectations of what a British guitar band could and should do square in the teeth.

The album kicks off with the proudly subtlety deficient Bassline, coming across like a Live Lounge cover of Changed The Way You Kissed Me, it finds McClure spouting lines like “All we cared about / Is a little bit of bump and grind”. These party hard lyrics come after a career spent impersonating Alex Turner (on debut The State of Things) and then Billy Bragg (On sophomore effort A French Kiss in the Chaos, “I don’t want your propaganda or your leaflet through my door/It seems that your friend hatred just don’t live here anymore” indeed) and yeah, they were try hard, but at the very least he was trying. One would only have to take a cursory look at the American pop charts and see the exact same sentiment reflected many, many times over. It’s still not actively bad, musically the albums pretty solid, the aforementioned Bassline is tailor made to make you dance like an absolute nutter, Noisy Neighbor is easily the best mix of guitars and dance beats on the album and closing number What Goes Around is just damn good, no caveats, a great mix of current pop production and classic pop songwriting, it’s just unfortunate that the rest of the album doesn’t share it’s freshness.

To sum up this really isn’t anything to get worked up about, and as I said before it would be very easy to cry “sell out!” and accuse McClure of jumping on a bandwagon but the truth is this does feel relatively natural, or at least, if he is jumping on a bandwagon he’s done it relatively well. However this is still a sub par effort, maybe worth a listen if 2006 is your musical year zero but otherwise, steer relatively clear.

★★★★★

Will Howard