Introduction

WISHVILLE (2000)
1) Sparks Are Gonna Fly; 2) Gasoline; 3) Lifeline; 4) What We Want To Believe In; 5) All Of That; 6) Idle Life; 7) Mad Dog; 8) Ballad Of A Running Man; 9) Creme Caramel.
Catherine Wheel's last album always gets a pretty bad rap from fans and critics alike; to me, however, the blow to music lovers' sensitivities that was dealt by Wishville does not feel nearly as crippling because I never fell under their original enchantment in the first place. What it does is smoothly and logically finalize their transformation from a psychedelic art-pop band into a moody alt-rock band — not in a revolutionary manner at all, merely putting the final touches on a trajectory that they began laying out already on Chrome. Maybe the hatred was partially due to all the new happenings in the band: they signed up with Columbia (sell-out!), fired their old bass player, and had Rob Dickinson produce all the sessions himself. Neither of these things per se is criminal, but taken together, they give some cause for premature alarm.
Still, the main single from the album, ʽSparks Are Gonna Flyʼ, is not too bad. Its revolving one-chord melody may well be accused of monotonousness, but then again, this was never a band known for super-complex riffs anyway, and the song's relentless pounding, coupled with the des­peration in Dickinson's voice, makes for some decent morose headbanging fodder. At least there's some sort of daring, genuinely aggressive melodic minimalism here, and it still manages to co­exist with a massive wall of sound, like in the old days. This is not something that can be said about the second single, ʽGasolineʼ, which sounds as if they were trying to produce one of those creepy, trip-hoppy, Freudian masterpieces Peter Gabriel-style (ʽDigging In The Dirtʼ), but failed because of insufficient musicianship and not enough ideas to make the atmosphere truly creepy (tiny bits of eerie laughter here and there in the corners don't really count). In addition, there's not much to be said about a chorus that consists of just one line, "I love gasoline", which your brain probably refuses to process in a logical manner; personally, I have no idea what Dickinson means by "gasoline" here, and I'm not sure I even want to know.
After that, the record simply goes on to fulfill its original promise — track after track of slow, distorted, melancholic alt-rock where each song sets the exactly same tone as its predecessor, with the main emphasis placed almost exclusively on Dickinson's soulful choruses. That, actually, is the primary problem of Wishville: the near-complete lack of kaleidoscopic guitar patterns courtesy of Brian Futter, who seems content to contribute simple, unadorned lead guitar parts to Dickinson's more-and-more generic alt-rock riffage. Where the vocals on the band's first two albums were more like a cherry on top of the polyphonic guitar explosions, here it's all about the vocals — and too many of these vocals just sound like your average hard rock whiner, paralyzed by spiritual laziness and unable to convert his general dissatisfaction with everything and every­body into anything remotely constructive or properly destructive. Either of the two would work well for me, but nothing is truly delivered.
All in all, it's a fairly sad case of «self-betrayal», when you gradually let go of the things that constitute your strength in favor of doing something where you just can't compete with the best of the competition. Dickinson has a decent voice that can carry a good amount of soul, but when you stare it right in the face, it's fairly monotonous and colorless — certainly nothing like a Robert Smith, for instance, with his capacity of making it ring, rise, and fall, but nothing like a Michael Stipe, either, with his soothing, almost priestly, peace-be-with-you-son murmur. Turning the dial away from the psychedelic guitar sound and into the direction of these vocals was a rather pride­ful and completely unwarranted development, a gamble that did not pay off, and a sorry finale for Catherine Wheel as a bunch of musicians wanting to leave their own trace in this world — and while I don't know the details, I'm pretty sure that the band split not because Wishville got poor reviews and sold few copies, but because it simply did not make any sense to keep the band alive once the transformation had been completed.
I am not giving the record a thumbs down, though; like I said, acute hatred towards it is a little unwarranted, because technically, it is still several inches above the generic alt-rock waterline — Dickinson is a monotonous, but never truly irritating singer, and there are still enough tasty guitar bits here to last you through at least one listen. But returning to it after your own desire? You'd have to be a real St. Augustine to do that.

THE CHARLATANS (UK)

SOME FRIENDLY (1990)
1) You're Not Very Well; 2) White Shirt; 3) The Only One I Know; 4) Opportunity; 5) Then; 6) 109 Pt. 2; 7) Polar Bear; 8) Believe You Me; 9) Flower; 10) Sonic; 11) Sproston Green.
Although The Charlatans came together in the West Midlands and made their first recordings in between Birmingham and Wales, their first album is as stereotypically «Madchester» as it gets, so much so that occasionally it becomes hard to keep track of where one baggy piece ends and another one begins. It is, in fact, very easy to dismiss the entire album as «Stone Roses lite» and just move on, because at first it does seem that all they are doing is a less layered, less deep, more dance-oriented version of the Stone Roses — just like any other freshly formed band in late Eighties / early Nineties United Kingdom (think early Blur, etc.). Give it a few more spins, though... and yes, they are definitely doing a less layered, less deep, more dance-oriented version of the Stone Roses, no doubt about it whatsoever! But they are talented lads, and there are a few subtle, but important nuances that put some flesh on their shadows.
Although all five Charlatans are credited for songwriting, it is clear that one and only one domi­nates the sound or, at least, makes it a special kind of sound — keyboard player Rob Collins. This may not be heard so well on the opening number ʽYou're Not Very Wellʼ, where his organ forms a democratic triumvirate with John Baker's funky guitars and Martin Blunt's powerful bass; but already the second song, a more traditional power-pop number called ʽWhite Shirtʼ, is fully dependent on Collins' organ lead-riffs, whereas Baker is largely restricted to monotonous rhyth­mic jangling, and lead vocalist Tim Burgess delivers all the lyrics in largely the same, slightly whispery-ethereal tone (think Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, but without all the psyche­delic mixing). Collins is the real star on most of the tracks — if he is not playing optimistic pop melodies in mid-Sixties style, he is throwing out choppy, angry rhythm chords that add an aggres­sive angle to this otherwise inoffensive dance-pop; and in addition to the Hammond organ (already a somewhat obsolete instrument by 1990, one might say), he even drags out the Mello­tron from time to time, as an intentional antidote to the «futurism» of the baggy rhythmics.
The biggest hit from the album was ʽThe Only One I Knowʼ, and it is fairly typical of the band's overall sound at this point. You get to know everything there is to know by approximately 0:30 into the song, but it is no big deal because what there really is to know is that they got a groovy thing going, with Blunt's bass and Collins' slash-and-burn organ technique perfectly underpinning each other, while Baker is hanging somewhere out there in the shadows with his subtly mixed guitar parts. The vocalist is something you can take or leave: I feel no impulse to go and check out the lyrics, because what matters is the ghostly effect of Burgess' voice rather than the actual words (and the words?.. "well, it's a love thing", as Mike Love would say). But the groove is nice, and while being totally modern for the standards of 1990, it also reflects a strong influence of their Sixties' idols like the Spencer Davis Group (ʽI'm A Manʼ, etc.), so here is something that can satisfy both the conservative and the futurist.
The group fares worse when they try to introduce a more psychedelic flavor — one of the results is (missed) ʽOpportunityʼ, a seven-minute long atmospheric bore whose main point is in how dark guitar clouds gradually drape over the serene organ clouds: not without inspiration, but ultimately Baker is not even close to the wizardry of My Bloody Valentine, not to mention pro­fessional shoegazers of the Slowdive etc. variety, and with Collins taking a back seat to the guita­rist, the track does a better job of laying open the artistic limitations of the band than showing off their value. That is not to say that Baker adds nothing to the sound: it is his colorful pop riffs, produced in a San Francisco acid rock style, that breathe life into ʽFlowerʼ, another song whose groove power is relaxed so that the band can concentrate more on the melodic aspect. Elsewhere, you can sometimes fall upon Martin Blunt as the center of attention — his oh-so simple, but per­vasively nagging and paranoid bassline on ʽThenʼ, the album's second single, is probably the single most important thing responsible for its commercial success. But even that song would have not been nearly as haunting without Collins' organ in the background.
So does the record have some sort of conceptually overwhelming message / meaning? If it does, it is probably the same as with The Stone Roses — an exuberant celebration of life's bright and dark moments, a new strain of youthful futuristic idealism draped in slightly psychedelic colors. The album's finale, a track dedicated to a long-gone love affair and lovingly entitled ʽSproston Greenʼ (allegedly the place where it hap­pened), emphasizes this feeling with one of the album's most upbeat tempos, some of its most exuberant vocal harmonies, and a frantic coda with several overdubbed organ parts and Collins going completely out of his head — a psycho thunderstorm that, however, carries no threat whatsoever; on the contrary, it is a thunderstorm in which many of us would love to get caught. No, this is not a masterpiece of an album: too derivative, too repetitive, too unambitious to ever pretend to A-level status — but it's an album that can make you feel warm all over, and that's enough to warrant a solid thumbs up.

BETWEEN 10TH AND 11TH (1992)
1) I Don't Want To See The Sights; 2) Ignition; 3) Page One; 4) Tremelo Song; 5) The End Of Everything; 6) Subtitle; 7) Can't Even Be Bothered; 8) Weirdo; 9) Chewing Gum Weekend; 10) (No One) Not Even The Rain.
This is probably a great driving album — all these rock-steady funky rhythms and unnerving Madchester beats are your perfect companion for a long, monotonous highway trip as you try not to fall asleep behind the wheel. But as a work of art, The Charlatans' second album is at least one notch below their first, since it adds nothing new to their sound and, in fact, seems even to take away something old; in particular, I have not noticed any attempts to go for an old-fashioned sound like they did with ʽWhite Shirtʼ. This time, it's all about modern dance, and the idea of modern dance in early Nineties' Britain was a bit... stiff.
Now an established act in their own rights, they could allow themselves a highly reputed producer, and the sound here is determined by Flood (Mark Ellis), who had previously produced Erasure and worked as an engineer for Nick Cave, U2, and Depeche Mode (and would eventually be one of those responsible for ruining U2's artistic credibility). Unsurprisingly, the emphasis is placed even stronger on groove, at the expense of melody, and so, for the most part, it is hard to tell one song from another, unless you take the extra effort to decode the psychologism of the lyrics, some of which are actually not bad at all, or concentrate very specifically on the guitar and keyboard work, some of which seems quite well thought out.
The first single drawn from the album was ʽWeirdoʼ, which became the band's biggest US hit and fared pretty well on the home market as well. Its singular attraction is typical of the Charlatans: mixing modern rhythms and electronics with a loud, almost storming Hammond organ sound — somewhat justifying the song title, since the recording does have a «weirdo» feel against all the regular Madchester production of the time. Once again, Collins is the main hero here: the syn­copated guitars, programmed drums, and the acid synth bleeping would make this sound like an 808 State outtake, but his organ outbursts, alternating between paranoid sustain and choppy funk chords, are what gives the track a life of its own — although, in my opinion, he never goes far enough to drive the song to truly ecstatic heights (not that he could: this would require an exten­ded organ solo, and that would have been judged too «progressive» and «pretentious», had he attempted to try it).
The real problem, however, is that the organ parts of ʽWeirdoʼ actually make it stand out, while the typical track on this album is much more even — think something like ʽChewing Gum Week­endʼ, where keyboards, guitars, and vocals all merge together in a smooth dance-gel, cool to tap your foot to, but little else. The only other tune with a very distinct keyboard part is ʽTremelo Songʼ, where Collins switches from organ to electric piano (I think), and pulls out a simple, but efficient little nagging riff that oozes tension and paranoia, and then multiplies them in a clever symbiosis with the bass line. Again, not surprisingly, the track came out as the second single, led off by Burgess' cheerful introduction of "The birds don't sing / They crush my skull / And I am worthless". (It is actually sad that Burgess is such a generally colorless singer — some of those lyrics are quite poetic, and we can only wonder what could be achieved here with a distinctive, rather than camouflaging, vocalist, like Robert Smith or Dave Gahan).
On the few occasions that the band breaks away from the formula, the efforts are largely wasted. ʽIgnitionʼ slows down the groove, but this merely means that instead of listening to funky chords, we have to take in a lot of controlled feedback; hugged by Collins' keyboard overdubs processed through studio trickery, it tries to convince you to give in to psychedelic seduction, but somehow it all comes across as amateurish and boring to me. Another attempt is made with ʽSubtitleʼ, where they give up on rhythm altogether and drown the sound in synthesized strings and elec­tronic wobble, while Burgess is trying his hardest to sound like an angel from Heaven. Result? It's like the bus from Magical Mystery Tour has just gotten hopelessly bogged down in a New Age swamp. Better get back to them dance grooves, boys.
Cutting a long story short, this is a respectable effort, but it belongs very much in 1992, an «alt-dance» experience that is way too constrained by the formulaic limitations of its era, and seems almost afraid to fully exploit the talents of the band's most talented members (Blunt and Collins). At least the last track, ʽNot Even The Rainʼ, ends things on a somewhat catchy chorus and an unusually grim coda with industrial overtones (Flood's clients had also included Nitzer Ebb and Ministry, so the man was no stranger to industrial) — I just wish there'd been more eye-and-ear-catching moments like these on the album to pique my interest.
UP TO OUR HIPS (1994)
1) Come In Number 21; 2) I Never Want An Easy Life If Me And He Were To Get There; 3) Can't Get Out Of Bed; 4) Feel Flows; 5) Autograph; 6) Jesus Hairdo; 7) Up To Our Hips; 8) Patrol; 9) Another Rider Up In Flames; 10) Inside Looking Out.
Here is where the band begins, very slowly, climbing out of the Madchester idiom, which had pretty much played out its potential by the mid-Nineties. The funky dance grooves are still the default way of life for the band, but they are not nearly as all-pervasive now, and the band finds itself more free to experiment with various styles of pop, rock, and R&B. Lending a hand is pro­ducer Steve Hillage, the former guitar wizard of Gong — of course, it would be silly to think that he would actively push them towards a «neo-progressive» choice of action, but still, the transition from Flood to Hillage is quite symbolic.
Arguably the most innovative track here is the lengthy instrumental ʽFeel Flowsʼ. Announced by a viciously cymbal-drenched, crash-boom-bang drum pattern from Jon Brookes, the guy who had previously sat in the rhythmic shadows, it feels closer to a psychedelic funky workout from the early 1970s (with an extra bit of industrial flavor) than to anything «modern» — the whole track feels like a lengthy, cool, calm con­versation between a council of electric toads, represented by the acid, distorted tones of Rob Collins' key­boards and Mark Collins' guitars. It is far darker and heavier than anything they did before, though not exactly a radical departure from the foundations of The Charlatans' sound (funky, ominous, and slightly psychedelic).
In sharp contrast, the first single, ʽCan't Get Out Of Bedʼ, is a bona fide power pop number, with the keyboards taking second place to colorful guitars and anthemic choruses; the problem is that the song's melody and the song's message are way too indirect and confusing to give you a direct emotional jolt: a mixture of happy-sad where neither component is truly overwhelming. It did manage to be more commercially successful than the second single (ʽI Never Want...ʼ), perhaps because it went back to laying on the funk without much care for the hooks; actually, the design of the chorus is curious — the sneering song title echoes Lennon's "I am he as you are he..." a little bit, while the countering vocal asks you "how does it feel?" in a Dylan-ish manner — but with Burgess' tired intonations, this song, at best, triggers intellectual, not spiritual associations with walruses and rolling stones.
The third and last single bore the mildly provocative title ʽJesus Hairdoʼ and tried its best to combine the funky dance groove with a pop chorus, but again, it's nice and listenable and not very impressive, because what exactly is that "and you shine like a star, and you shine like a genius" chorus supposed to mean? They wobble somewhere between optimism and irony, stum­bling with fairly bad lyrics ("and it's hard to know reality when you don't have a life" strives so hard to be profound that this makes its banality even more disgusting) and placing all the musical emphasis on distorted slide guitars, but they have neither a George Harrison nor a Rory Gallagher in the band to make them work. Listenable and forgettable.
The best songs on the album, therefore, are not the singles — besides the already mentioned ʽFeel Flowsʼ, it is the title track, saved by a particularly savage Collins organ riff, and ʽPatrolʼ (which should rather be known as "mess up my mind, mess up my mind"), where, once again, they slow down the tempo to stabilize and deepen a fairly evil funk groove. Essentially, they come closest to succeeding when they do not try to outbalance their dark side with brighter elements, but when they embrace the dark side fully (or, at least, as fully as possible before happy dance people stop buying their records altogether). On the whole, though, Up To Our Hips sounds like a transi­tional album with a lack of focus — something that a great band could have turned to their ad­vantage, but a merely decent band like The Charlatans should have never allowed themselves.
THE CHARLATANS (1995)
1) Nine Acres Court; 2) Feeling Holy; 3) Just Lookin'; 4) Crashin' In; 5) Bullet Comes; 6) Here Comes A Soul Saver; 7) Just When You're Thinkin'; 8) Tell Everyone; 9) Toothache; 10) No Fiction; 11) See It Through; 12) Thank You.
The Internet always disappoints you. Here I was so proud of myself that I'd spotted the amazing fact — on this record, The Charlatans have been influenced not once, but twice by John Lennon, and not just by John Lennon, but specifically by John Lennon's fairly obscure solo song ʽBring On The Lucie (Freda People)ʼ from the Mind Games album: the verse melody was borrowed for ʽJust When You're Thinkin' Things Overʼ (including the very same line from one of the verses), and the bridge melody was borrowed for the bridge of ʽJust Lookin'ʼ. This is downright bizarre, isn't it? And hard to spot unless you're familiar with both The Charlatans and John's solo career... but apparently, I'm not the only one, since numerous mentions of this weird double rip-off can be easily found on the Web. (Not in S. Th. Erlewine's review of the album on The All-Music Guide, though, which reads as if he never once heard the record: "occasionally, the album relies too heavily on trippy dance instrumentals" — not only do the two parts of this sentence contradict each other, but there is only one instrumental on this album, so how can it rely on them too heavily?). Anyway, just goes to show how hard it is to make an original discovery in this modern world of ours. Well, perhaps nobody spotted so far that the line "it's a matter of taste, yeah!" on the very same ʽJust When You're Thinkin' Things Overʼ directly copies one of the lines from the Stones' ʽTorn And Frayedʼ. Let that be my bit of consolation.
You already get the gist of it, I think. On their self-titled fourth album, The Charlatans retread even farther from the contemporary dance scene — now, essentially, they are making traditional pop songs supported by modernized dance beats, not vice-versa. The only thing that survives through all the shifts is their penchant for syncopated funky riffs and rhythms: the absolute majo­rity of the songs here swing and swirl and wobble — no strict 4-4 beats for these guys. This is also the major source of the remaining problems: too many of the songs sound alike. For instance, that very instrumental opening the album, ʽNine Acre Courtʼ, is an enjoyable jam that spends half of the time in a duel between Blunt and Rob Collins and the other half of the time in a spaced-out na-na-na chant over distorted electric guitar (somewhat reminiscent of the style of The Brian Jonestown Massacre) — then, once it's gone, the vocal number ʽFeeling Holyʼ opens up with pretty much the exact same melody, and where precisely is the fun in that?
With ʽJust Lookin'ʼ, the album opens into the dimension of power-pop (and John Lennon rip-offs) which it, thankfully, never completely closes again — the only problem being that there is still too much emphasis on rhythm and not enough on melody: each of these songs will have you toe-tapping in no time, but there are no override-all seductive touches. I like it, really I do, how they combine groovy funky verses with all-out pop choruses — ʽBullet Comesʼ, for instance, sounds like the Stones' ʽHey Negritaʼ in the verse section, and then borrows some piano chords from the McCartney songbook for the chorus, then goes back again into dance mode. However, there is no personality to the instrumental work: even Rob Collins is subdued in the mix, while Mark Collins' guitars are almost buried below the bass level, just rumbling along monotonously instead of pushing forward like a properly aggressive beast. Likewise, ʽJust When You're Thinkin' Things Overʼ seems to do everything right, formally, but cannot compete with the songs it is inspired by, not least because Tim Burgess still cannot get me interested in his voice. Also, no offense, but I think all their lyrics suck: they sound as if they'd be supposed to make a lot of sense, but in all honesty, they do not. "I see you close down the windows / I see you burn down your throne... / You look good when your heart is on fire... / You don't follow the line find the sun" is just not some­thing I'd sing to my partner even if I wanted to befuddle her.
If there is one song here that sticks out a bit more than the rest, it would be ʽToothacheʼ — opening on a drilling guitar riff that agrees very well with the title, it is yet another funky groove, but this time, the boys manage to pack some sneeriness, some acid, and some aggression into the proceedings. Mark Collins always works well with slide guitars; Blunt's acoustic bass line gives the song a dark Morphine-like feel; the lengthy jam section is well dominated by Rob's organ work; and at times, the band descends into Zeppelin-style sonic hell (though in reality, this is more similar to the unjustly forgotten second album by The Stone Roses — the one where they traded in their happiness for bluesy gloom and ended up ridiculed by their own fans).
Still, I am willing to give the record a thumbs up. I come out of it remembering nothing but the bizarre Lennon rip-offs and the gnarly riff of ʽToothacheʼ, but they unquestionably have a classy sound going on here — a bit stiff, perhaps (which is only too typical of any Brit band from the Nineties), but an excellent combination of modern funk rhythms, acoustic and electric guitars, old-fashioned organ, and well-meaning singer guy all the same. They think they know what it means, really they do — they just can't explain.