The Charlatans - You Cross My Path

by Andrew Dolton

A darker Charlatans

"The album thematically has a sense of the melancholy but with a knowing wink. Song titles aren’t everything but such topics as vanity, bad days, mistakes and despair leave little to the imagination."

In these modern times where the music currency lies far more in the download rather than the physical CD it becomes a very purist thing to actually want to own the physical product. When the quantity and quality of your mp3 player and the tracks upon it forms the playground taunt then you can tell the world has moved on.

The new Charlatans album has been available as a free download on the XFM website since the start of March and on The Charlatans own website since the middle of the same month. So now at the start of May exactly who will be chomping at the bit to purchase the ‘old fashioned’ CD, case and all?

Part of the answer to that question may lie in the quality of the music that lies within. The case for purchase will be greatly furthered by what is a very good album by a very good band. The opening lyric is “when I was a little child” and this seems very poetic. As much as the reformed Take That have the same fans just a matter of years older, The Charlatans will have fans that have been with them since they were small children back in the late 80s. When you have a career that takes you a tenth studio album you would hope that you were getting quite good at producing something that people would want to hear.

All the usual Charlatans ingredients are here but with a slightly different edge added to the recipe. The album benefits from the introduction of the Alan Moulder sound. His production keeps the music very much still indicative of The Charlatans but with something extra that leaves it musically somewhere between a less anthemic Killers sound and late eighties Depeche Mode.

The album thematically has a sense of the melancholy but with a knowing wink. Song titles aren’t everything but such topics as vanity, bad days, mistakes and despair leave little to the imagination. A final track called ‘This Is The End’ rather says it all. At times it is introspective, at others it sounds like a one sided argument over a romantic split and at others like a soapbox diatribe for a forgotten age.

The track ‘My Name Is Despair’ is a perfect example of the album. The track is immediately sparse whilst at the same time being very full (if that is not a complete contradiction). Almost doom-laden piano chords argue for supremacy over frantic beats with a repetitive call that “my name is despair”. The track and the album are musically dark but alive with a lyrical trait based on a poetic view of reality.

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