Reverend and The Makers - Heavyweight Champion of the World Single Review

Reverend and The Makers
Heavyweight Champion of the World
Single Review

Owing more than a nod to Madchester, Reverend and the Makers, finally swagger into the music world's conscience. It would have been easy to cash in on the Arctic Monkeys link a while back, but this first single is almost worth the weight. Based on a bed of electro-disco beats and all-encompassing, atmospheric guitars Reverend lays down a tale of how he "could have been someone", but has missed his opportunity and is now "caught up in the rat-race, feeling like a no-one". It's a diatribe on the boring normality of the necessity of everyday life, compared to actually achieving something monumental, and on that level it works.

The down sides to this single release are the B-sides and the vocals. The first B-side is a painfully written attack on 18-30 holidays. The subject matter is fair game, and the themes are recogniseable, but it grates with a childlike rhyming style. The other B-side, a poem with John Cooper Clarke, shows a much better lyrical style however.

All in all it's a promising start, they've set the bar very high in what they want to achieve and we'll have to wait and see whether they do achieve the goals that are now set in these lyrics, or whether they themselves will have to return to the mundane world from where they swaggered in from.

David Lapidus