I find it hard to describe you

Continuing my trip back through the 1999 album charts.

24/10/99 : Us And Us Only - The Charlatans

I've liked a bit of Charlatans over the years but this is a slightly odd one - I did own it (5/10), but I'm not sure I really ever listened to it.  Exactly why that is may become clear over the next 52 minutes...

Hmmm.  Well, starting the album with a 7:25 long track (with a really long intro) isn't exactly the best way to grab an audience - I expect they were just establishing their serious music credentials.  All the tracks are perfectly fine, but I think the problem is that I bought this after having bought Melting Pot, their best of - which is a cracking selection and there's just very few tracks on here that I'd swap for any on that album, with the exception of "My Beautiful Friend" which has some beautiful sweeping jangly guitars on it.  So I suspect I listened to it the once and then it just found its way to the bottom of my CD pile, never to re-emerge - which is a bit of a shame because it's a perfectly fine album, but that's as far as it goes.

We're at #2 with a new entry on the chart this week - which was a bit higher than I was expecting (they've actually had three #1 albums) and this was the highest it managed on a 15 week run.  The rest of the top five were Shania, Travis, Eurythmics (a new entry - Peace, which I don't think I've ever heard) and B*witched (another new entry, which I definitely haven't heard) and there's one more new entry in the top ten - Melanie C's Northern Star (#10) which is an album I really like and it looks like we'll catch up with in '00.

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album (230 milliPeppers) but it manages to be very light on content - there's an awful lot of back story in there.  The critics were actually pretty nice about it with quite a few of them commenting how it felt like they made the album they wanted to make, which I can go along with.  I was however amused by the faint praise from AllMusic who said it was "merely a step below their previous high point of Tellin' Stories".  Commercially, it only did anything over here which feels like a shame - Tim Burgess commented they were happy enough with it not doing as well as Tellin' Stories because it allowed them to detach themselves from Britpop.  He compares it with Wonderland, their next album, which I really like so I'm looking forward to listening to that again in '01.

"Customers also listened to" Shed Seven, Cast, Inspiral Carpets and The Seahorses - oh, maybe they haven't quite detached themselves from Britpop as much as they'd like.  This is a good album though and it feels like it could be a grower, but for me there's just so much better Charlatans stuff out there that this is always going to get ignored.  Which is a shame, but there we are.

17/10/99 - Another fine album
31/10/99 - Interesting, if variable

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