Charlatans

The Charlatans - Some Friendly
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 304 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: PDI # 80.2324 | Country/Year: Spain 1990
Genre: Rock, Electronic | Style: Brit Pop

…"The Only One I Know" remains the best-known cut, Blunt's crisp bass and Collins' Deep Purple-inspired keyboards providing its charge. But Some Friendly's hidden masterpiece comes at the very end – "Sproston Green," a monster jam based on Collins' supreme keyboard work, with Burgess' soaring lyric matching the massive surge of the music. It remains the concluding number of the band's sets to this day for good reason.

Us and Us Only picks up where Tellin' Stories left off and twists that album's virtues around. Where that record was essentially a stripped-down, straight-ahead collection, Us and Us Only dresses up the band's continually impressive songcraft in a moody atmosphere, borrowed in equal parts from Blonde on Blonde, Beggars Banquet, and the Chemical Brothers. The album unfolds in a haze of keyboards and subdued beats, and this murky veil never really lifts throughout the record, even as harmonics and acoustic guitars break through the mist every once and a while. Consequently, the album can initially seem a little amorphous, albeit intriguingly amorphous, filled with deep grooves and tantalizing sonic textures. Repeated plays reveal that Us and Us Only is merely a step below their previous high point of Tellin' Stories. If nothing is as immediately grabbing as "North Country Boy" or "One to Another," that's not a problem, since nearly every song works its charms with subtle grace and considerable muscle. "Forever" soon reveals itself as a minor masterpiece of swirling menace and swagger, while the Dylan inflections of "A House Is Not a Home" and "My Beautiful Friend" seem natural instead of grandstanding.

As an initial taster for Between 10th and 11th, Me in Time in fact turned out to be the basis of a rethink - sessions with Hugh Jones in fact didn't end up going anywhere beyond this, while the title track wasn't included on the album at all!

Known for their rise during the era of baggy and madchester U.K. band The Charlatans will return a new album in May, the follow up to 2015's Modern Nature. The album features guest appearnaces from Johnny Marr, Paul Weller, Stephen Morris and Kurt Wagner of Lambchop.