The Album Review Club - Week #145 - (page 1923) - Tellin' Stories - The Charlatans

I quite enjoyed this. Yes it is very Doors-like. Is that a bad thing? There are some good evolving spells of synth and bass build. It has strong elements of punk and identity too. And for all it's frowny seriousness, it has some playfulness to it. Musicians know what they are doing, do not attempt at overgimmicking it. Peaches is the big hit but imo Down the Sewer is the song of the album. It could maybe do with a bit of a purge to remove some of the weaker songs, but overall, it is good and got me tapping/ nodding along to it. A good 7.
 
The Stranglers are a band I got into kind of retrospectively, sometime in the 80’s.
The thing about the stuff in the 70’s, is they were classed as punk and the singles were in a way, but I was wrapped up in Prog which was exactly the kind of stuff that punk was rejecting and rebelling against. I liked the singles like Peaches and Heroes because it wasn’t really like other punk stuff.

The Stranglers always appeared to be more mature. They were almost post punk before the punk era was over. They could actually play their instruments for a start and seemed to want to showcase mastery of same, which to me seemed the opposite of what the likes of the Pistols were at.
There’s some decent tunes on this album, but the quality isn’t uniform all the way through.
I had the best of CD in the 80’s and very good it was too. Most of what I like on this album is stuff I’ve already heard from the compilation album.

I’ve only done one listen. I’ll try to get the time for a few more before making a final judgement.
 
Still love this to this day.
A 17 year old when I bought this on vinyl.
All about the bass and synth.
Not a bad track on this but Sometimes,Hanging Around,Peaches,Get a grip on yourself and my favourite Down in the Sewer stand out tracks.
Every intro is bang on the money as well.
Off to investigate more of their stuff.
I had their first 5 albums but stopped listening to them after that.
9/10
 
hard to nail, but would definitely class 'Down In The Sewer' as that.
They got more mellow as they evolved. The latter albums are very different from Rattus Norvegicus. I had every album till Hugh Conwell left, Dreamtime was the last album he played in. After that I had no interest in the band when Paul Roberts became frontman.
 

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.