Post 2, Day 2: The Charlatans - Moden Nature (Part One)

As I started to write this, I realized that this review was going to be longer than originally anticipated, so here's the first part of my take on The Charlatans new album, Modern Nature.

When life knocks you down, you can either stay down or come out swinging.  I love Norwich's The Charlatans because they always come out swinging.  They are the only band to come out of the Madchester scene who hasn't stopped.  Sure, Happy Mondays are still around, and The Stone Roses might be, or might not, depending on which rumors you're listening to this week, but The Charlatans have been going strong for 25 years, overcoming enough challenges to fill an entire season of Behind The Music.  Released on January 26th in Europe, and sometime later this month in the US, their twelfth album, Modern Nature, finds the band recovering from the loss of founding drummer Jon Brookes with an album that will likely go down as one of the highlights of their already magnificent career.

Modern Nature proves that lightning can strike twice.  Following the death of organ and keyboard player Rob Collins in 1996, Tellin' Stories was hailed as a triumph upon its release the following year.  To me, however, the real triumph was 1999's Us & Us Only, because by all accounts, Tellin' Stories was in the mixing stages at the time of Collins passing.  Not that completing the album and touring for it upon hiring Tony Rodgers wasn't challenging, but Us & Us Only was the first album they had to make without the member who set The Charlatans sound apart from the other bands of the time.  It was Collins Hammond C3 sound that made early tracks like "The Only One I Know" and "Weirdo" distinct, so Us & Us only was the first album they really had to write without any input from him... and they came through like champs!  At some point in this blog I'll probably post about each of their albums, so I won't get too deep into Us & Us Only in this post, but suffice to say the album is a bold statement that said The Charlatans were here to stay.

Eleven years later, they released their eleventh album, the fantastic Who We Touch, at the time their strongest album since Us & Us Only, when Brookes collapsed onstage in Philadelphia and was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  When he lost his battle with brain cancer three years later, you had to wonder if this might be one obstacle too many for the band to overcome.  When they joined friends for a charity concert at London's Royal Albert Hall in Brookes' memory, even guitarist Mark Collins is quoted as saying he wondered if it would be their last show.

However, Brookes was adamant that there be another Charlatans record, and the band reconvened in early 2014 to work on new material with the help of Factory Floor's Gabe Gurnsey, New Order's Stephen Morris, and The Verve's Pete Salisbury on drums.  The result is a stunning collection of songs filled with warmth and soul; a collection filled with the types of grooves and melodic hooks that have been the trademark of the band's career.