Us And Us Only (1999)
10 years on from Indian Rope and the Charlatans go country - big style! A gorgeous collection of soulful country melodies wash all over this record. Tim reaches new heights with his lyrical maturity - Bob Dylan is the obvious influence and he's not a bad bloke to learn from! Instantly loveable this record deserves to be in everyone's collection.
Rating 4/5
Chart position 2
Reviews
Nigel Williamson (The Times 1999)
If, as expected, Us and Us Only sees the Charlatans in pole position in next week's chart, it will be their fourth No 1- album of the Nineties, an achievement matched only by Blur and Jamiroquai among British bands.
Given the band's history it will be a remarkable feat, for when it comes to rock'n'roll survivors, the Charlatans are among the most battered and bruised. Bad luck has dogged the band ever since Tim Burgess and his mates emerged ,from the Madchester scene with their loose, swirling psychedelia at the end of the Eighties. Their debut album, Some Friendly went to No 1 in ]990 yet within a year they were falling apart. Guitarist John Baker quit and bassist Martin Blunt had a breakdown. Then keyboardist Rob Collins was sent to jail for his part ,in an armed robbery. But the Charlatans bounced back and with Collins free again, 1995's The Charlatans gave them their second No 1 album. A year later the trouble-prone keyboardist died in a car accident and again their future looked in doubt. But just as the Manics made their best album after the loss of Richey Edwards, out of adversity the Charlatans produced the glorious Tellin' Stories. It gave them their third No 1 but their troubles were not over. Last year they discovered their accountant had defrauded them and they were virtually broke. But with replacement keyboardist Tony Rogers in place and a new £1 million contract with MCA, they continued recording their sixth album. The result is Us and Us Only, which completes a trio of great British rock records this autumn, following Supergrass and Gomez's offerings. Some would say that the album wears its influences too blatantly; the extended version of the single Forever with its swirling Hammond organ and pumping bass harks back to the Roses and the Mondays while A House is Not a Home rocks like early Stones. Senses begins with a harmonica wailing like a lonesome freight train and then moves into a blues-tinged epic that would have done Gomez proud. My Beautiful Friend, with its mellotron-laden psychedelia, is ostensibly a love song but reads like a tribute to Collins with Burgess poignantly repeating: "Do you ever get this feeling when it's hard to carry on." There are shades of Nell Young on the jaunty Don't Care Where You Live and The Blind Stagger is what Nick Drake might have sounded like if he had ever rocked out. But all music is, to an extent, the sum of its influences. Ever since the Stones started copying Chuck Berry riffs, the best bands have been distinguished by the ability to reinterpret what has gone before in a way which is fresh rather than merely derivative.
Us and Us Only as its title suggests, still sounds like no one but the Charlatans. It's the perfect album for the back end of 1999, where past, present and future collide and no one knows quite what will happen next. It's taken them a decade of ups and downs but the Charlatans have finally made a great record as opposed to a merely good one.
Tom Doyle (Q Magazine 1999)
When the shitstorm threatens to engulf them, The Charlatans doggedly plough forward (latest blow: band accountant - now jailed - ripping them off to the tune of £300,000). Buoyed no doubt by the nearly double platinum status of Melting Pot, their 1998 Best Of, the group return what is undoubtedly their best album yet.
Pitched somewhere between Black Country heaviosity and older, more familiar influences, echoes of Led Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy and '68 Beatles/Stones are detectable throughout Us & Us Only (with new keyboardist Tony Rogers, they appear to have perfected that overcompressed Sympathy For The Devil piano sound). Accused in the past of writing jam-rooted "half songs", The Charlatans use 1996's mighty, melodic North Country Boy as a springboard here. The bottom-heavy, Mellotron-driven Senses finds the ghost of late jeyboardist Rob Collins revisit Tim Burgess as the "sweet black angel laughing on my shoulder"; I Don't Care Where You Live is something approximating an imagined Lennon/Richards collaboration, all honky tonk piano and flabby White Album tom toms. Then, there is the creeping, insidious, funky My Beautiful Friend - a sturdy foundation for that second singles compendium. The Charlatans became very successful - and really, really good - by stealth.
With Us & Us Only, they've suddenly become great. Head: Dogged Soldiers Sell: Never given to giving up.
Caroline Sullivan (The Guardian October 1999)
Once thought of as eternal occupants of rock'n'roll's economy class, the Charlatans are now ready to upgrade to Concorde. Us and Us Only is their sixth studio album and there are factors at work here that could finally propel them to the A-list.
They've left Beggar's Banquet, their label since 1993, for a glossy new deal with the heavy-hitting Universal, who are prepared to exercise considerable financial muscle to take them to the next level. At the same time, as they approach their 10th anniversary, there's a general feeling that respect is due for having lasted the course. Reviews of their Reading Festival headliner were unanimously warm, like a taken-for-granted old friend suddenly seen in a new and unexpectedly cool light. They've even received the first award of their career, even if it was only Loaded magazine voting One to Another "Single of the Decade".
More than many, they deserve it. They outlived the Madchester era that spawned them, survived keyboardist Rob Collins's death, and racked up three number-one albums (and a 500,000-selling greatest hits) and are now, in their quiet way, an institution, albeit one that tends to be forgotten about between albums.
Over the next 12 months, they'll be devoting their attentions to breaking America and being known worldwide. Given the ignominious failure met by nearly every other Brit band to have tried it since the 80s, they've got their work cut out. Yet if they're ever going to do it, the time is now, with a strong album and a commitment to doing whatever it takes. It's just a matter of persuading America that, far from being a "haircut band" (the worst possible insult), the Charlatans and their twirly Hammond organ kick US-friendly ass.
But this is a country where the Chemical Brothers were nominated for a Grammy in the Best Rock Instrumental category, so I wouldn't hold out much hope of Us and Us Only, which Blunt describes as "Bob Dylan and The Band on ecstasy playing the last night of the Heavenly Social", driving Limp Bizkit out of the Billboard Hot 100. That said, Burgess's new resident-alien status could give them an in, so you never know.
The opening track alone, Forever, should give Americans pause, being a seven-minute piece of several distinct sections and considerable keyboard-based complexity. The vocal doesn't come in for the first three minutes, and when it does, Burgess sings with an assurance he didn't possess in the days when he was perceived as the Mini-Me to psychedelic rock dreamboat Ian Brown (the former Stone Rose recently complained that Burgess was heavily "inspired" by him, a claim that Burgess contemptuously dismisses).
Forever's lyric must have raised a few eyebrows at Chez Charlatan when the others members first heard it, though, being both a delirious anticipation of his new California life ("I'm going where the sun always shines") and a rather arrogant farewell to those left behind ("I wonder what you people do with your lives").
It's the first album recorded wholly without Rob Collins, but new keyboardist Tony Rogers, who finished Collins's parts on 1997's Tellin' Stories LP, has slipped into his place so smoothly you can barely see the join. Senses (Angel on My Shoulder), about Rob looking down on the band with encouraging laughter, is a vengefully heavy country-blues number that comes closest to fulfilling the Dylan-on-ecstasy boast.
I Don't Care Where You Live and The Blind Stagger also visit the country, though this time it's the queasy hinter lands explored by The Rolling Stones around the time of Let It Bleed. Come to think of it, they'll like this one in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the wistful My Beautiful Friend, perhaps their prettiest ever tune and Burgess's most straightforward love song ("I swear I adore you/ Forever live inside of me"), should have college-rock stations joyously muttering about Nirvana/REM influences. As for The Blonde Waltz - acoustic, thoughtful and ancient-sounding - any sentient creature will deem it beautiful.
Maturity without greyness; that's what they strived for on Us and Us Only, and they achieved it. The Charlatans enter their second decade knowing they've made their best album. Now they just have to convince them in America.
NME (1999)
Once, The Charlatans were arrested on a plane for enjoying themselves and the FBI confiscated their shoelaces. "I thought, 'Maybe they think we'll hang ourselves,'" balked Tim Burgess at the time. "I wouldn't hang meself, you can't put a downer on me!"
Today, despite everything (latest Charlies Voodoo Conundrum, being robbed of £300,000 by their accountant), there remains in Tim's soul an 11-year-old optimism sprite who lives by the rule: "That which doesn't kill us, and even when it does, makes the music an even BIGGER life-snortin' panorama of vibe-jewelled reasons to live-it-like-you-love- it-and-have-you-heard-the -state-of-Ian-Brown's-'music' -lately-HA-HA" etc. 'Us And Us Only', The Charlatans' sixth LP (their first on a major label) is the sound of a band completing their long-promised mission to obliterate, forever, their indie status by entering the widescreen wonderland of eternal Rock'n'Roll Class.
Eleven songs, one soul-saving idea - namely, you can change your life and make it everything you need, if only you have the balls. Tim's off, then, married, to LA and he's telling you time and time again; on the hymnal 'Forever' with its Massive Attack bass brilliance, "Going where the sun always shines..."; on 'Impossible', all Bob Dylan mewls and mouth organ-puffin' pathos, "The whole world is like a postcard... if this is where you're going, I will surely leave", on 'I Don't Care Where You Live', all beautiful, Byrdsy harmonics, "I will follow you wherever you... ooooh oooh hooo!"; on the perksome loveliness of 'The Blonde Waltz', "Wouldn't it be nice to get away, shout, 'Mornin'! How are you today?'"
And everything else is love, soul and The Charlatans' Big-Sound-Band celebrating their fully-burgeoned musicianly might (even if they do include some unfathomable tribute to Bjork's 'Venus As A Boy' via the two-part Tinkerbell weird-out 'Good Witch/Bad Witch'). Overwhelmingly, though, it's The Charlatans' power-tuned, grown-up album of greats; the Stonesy licks of 'A House Is Not A Home', clop-along country corker 'My Beautiful Friend'; the Verve-sized 'Senses', featuring Tim almost literally crying, "You're my sweet black angel laughing on my shoulder..." (possibly about late keyboardist Rob Collins) and their most complete redemption song yet, the violin-quavered, bliss-rock stunner 'The Blind Stagger': "You will go the whole distance, while the blind stagger..." BLUB.
Only half of Tim Burgess is an 11-year-old boy, the other half's a 32-year-old man of the world and this is his rock'n'roll soul band's postcard from the leapt-off ledge of past pain into present ecstasy and peace in their land-mined lifetimes. Their good-luck years begin now. Definitely. Er, maybe. Or at least, as is The Charlatans' way, hopefully.