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May. 17th, 2007 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2Today's Song: Crashin' In by The Charlatans
My favorite song by The Charlatans was not only never a hit, it wasn't even good enough to make it onto a regular studio album. Back Room Window only appears on Songs From the Other Side, a collection of b-sides and unused tracks. It's a surprisingly good song, at least in my book, and should have been "a side" material.
It also doesn't appear on iTunes. Oh well. I like the Charlatans a lot, and I have other songs of theirs which are big favorites. Take, for example, Crashin' In, a song which starts out slow and doesn't seem in a hurry to get anywhere, but it builds steam and by the end is rolling along on like a freight train. Like many of their songs, the Hammond organ is featured prominently. I can never place my finger on exactly why I like this song so much; it has an odd, speed-up-slow-down kind of melody throughout most of the song, and the lyrics aren't especially clever or meaningful. But I do like it quite a bit.
In England this band gets compared to the Rolling Stones a lot, and I've never really been sure why. They're a popular British rock band with a singer with a whiney nasal voice, and they're on Beggar's Banquet Records, but other than that they don't seem to have much in common with the Stones. But in the video for this song in particular, vocalist Tim Burgess actually does look a bit like Mick Jagger, so maybe that's one of the reasons. And I suppose the Brits like to compare Oasis to the Beatles and need another band to be their Stones counterpart, or something.
In any case they're a good band that is much better known in the U.K. than they are here in the U.S. They came out of the same Manchester scene that spawned the Stone Roses, the Hearthrobs, the Happy Mondays, and the Soup Dragons. Of these, only the Charlatans that proved to have staying power. They're still making music today -- in fact I think I'm missing their last couple of releases.
The Charlatans also have a myspace page which features a few of their most popular tunes.
