The Charlatans - You Cross My Path
Cooking Vinyl/Shock
By Andrew P Street
First the good news: The Charlatans have made their best record since 1994's Up to Our Hips. Now the bad news: that's hardly a difficult task. While the band have generally popped out good singles, their albums are patchy at best (and 2001's Wonderland at worst) and You Cross My Path wins more by virtue of having no egregiously awful moments rather than boasting highlights in any sort of undeniably classic sense.
One difference is that instead of adopting a style and building an album around it (Stonesy rock'n'roll on their self-titled 1995 album; reggae/dub flavours on 2006's Simpatico), Tim Burgess & Co have found a new trick: pick a band – in this case, New Order – and base the album around them. Which might have been interesting if it hadn't been the last couple of NO albums, meaning that the Peter Hook-aping, up-the-neck bass playing of 'Bird/Reprise' sounds as melodically and creatively exhausted as most of Waiting for the Siren's Call.
Also, this being the first "independent" album that the band have ever made, they maybe should have dug deeper for some extra recording time: the closing 'This Is the End' has a very obvious drum stumble three minutes in that should really have necessitated another take. It's not terrible, but neither is it a creative renaissance.