Tag: The Charlatans

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: The Charlatans “Us and us only”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: The Charlatans
Album Title: Us and us only
Year released: 1999
Year reissued: 2019
Details: Limited edition, limited to 1000 copies, Record Store Day exclusive, clear vinyl

The skinny: So perhaps my expectations were unreasonable, as were my hopes that our local stores would somehow manage to track down some of the US and UK exclusives, but I have to admit to a modicum of disappointment with this year’s Record Store Day. Unless you count the free disc I scored with one of my purchases, the only RSD exclusive I picked up today is this one, though I did take advantage of the sales to procure a few records I’ve had my eye on for a while. Still, rather than dwelling on what I didn’t find, let’s have a look at this excellent clear vinyl reissue of The Charlatans’ 1999 album, “Us and us only”, that I did find. One of the many great albums by one of my favourite bands, this release was one of the few bright spots for me in the year it was released. And it sure does sound sweet on vinyl.

Standout track: “My beautiful friend”

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2001: #2 The Charlatans “A man needs to be told”

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Here we are, right near the top of the heap of 2001, and we have an awesome track off the seventh album by The Charlatans, a band considered also-rans of the Madchester era, more than a decade earlier. Yeah, and now they are now considered “survivors”.

Indeed, the group originally formed in 1989 and still continue to tour and release new albums, their latest being album number thirteen, “Different days”, in 2017, though only one member, Martin Blunt, still remains from their very early days. They weren’t from the Manchester area proper and yet they were originally lumped in with the likes of The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, more because of their blending of 60s rock sound with that of acid house culture. Their longevity can partly be attributed to their infusing different sounds to each of their albums, not necessarily to always blend in with their environment as some writers have suggested but to keep things fresh.

Released in our year of focus, “Wonderland” was the second album without original keyboard and organ wizard, Rob Collins, who had tragically died a few years earlier in a car crash and who had leant the band their trademark Hammond backbone. His replacement, Tony Rogers, fills in wonderfully but his mark isn’t the most indelible here. Instead, it’s frontman Tim Burgess that shows us a whole new set of colours by spending most of the album in falsetto, brushing the already soul and R&B-tunes with a swathe of Mayfield.

The highlight of the whole album, though, has got to be “A man needs to be told”. In fact, the tune ranks up there with my favourite of their tunes, even though my preference of their sounds is still that of their first couple of albums. It’s so damned laidback and groovy. Yeah, I just used that word. Groovy. Blunt’s funky bass line just booms along, answered in flourishes and tinkling bursts of piano. Jon Brooke’s drumming is spot on, understated but shimmering, right up to the end where the beat picks up substantially. And yeah, that’s none other than Canada’s own, Daniel Lanois adding his pedal steel to the mix, making the whole thing more dreamy. Burgess.

Ready to play it again? Let’s do it.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2001 list, click here.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 1990: #2 The Charlatans “Sproston green”

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Here we are at number two on this best of 1990 list and we find ourselves back on the dance floor. But we must’ve travelled back in time because it’s “Sproston green” by The Charlatans, their second appearance (the other being “The only one I know” at #14) on this list.

I mention the time travel bit as a personal joke between me and my friend Tim. We wandered into one of our old haunts, The Dance Cave in Toronto, after a bunch of drinks on my birthday a few years ago. After a few more, Tim went up to the DJ booth to request this tune, or any Charlatans tune, really, and was denied. The DJ didn’t care that it was my birthday and that we had danced many times to that same tune on that same floor, a decade or two earlier. He wasn’t having any of it. He gestured to the crowd of millenials that made up most of the drinkers that night and said that there was no way they would dance to it.

Now maybe I’m getting old and stubborn but I disagreed then and still do today. This is a song that can’t be ignored, you just have to dance to it. It’s a song so immense in scope that the band has continued to use it over the intervening decades to close out their live shows, much to the joy of their fans. It is definitely a personal favourite. And why not? At just over five minutes, “Sproston green” builds perfectly from the echoing, just beyond earshot guitar intro to a more a solidified onslaught once the rest of the band joins in the fun, led by that muscular bass and crazed, swirling organs, all the way to its crashing, ecstatic finale.

I’ve read somewhere that the words are based on the frontman’s first sexual experience and I suppose that could be true: “This one knows she comes and goes, and when she goes she goes.” It’s as deep as they get… But you don’t really listen to the Charlies for the lyrics, do you? No, no, no. It’s all about the groove and this particular tune has that bit down solid.

Go ahead and disagree. I’m ready for you.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 1990 list, click here.