The Charlatans – We Are Love Review

Grief is a core part of this upcoming release from The Charlatans. It has brought out the best in artists before this. Lean on it too much, and it becomes an unconvincing crutch. We Are Love, the title track from their upcoming album, walks a fine line. Returning to their Wales-based recording studio for the first time in thirty years for their first album in eight, The Charlatans’ latest release is solid. The band manages to navigate around the easy pitfalls of nostalgia rock and makes for a nice enough studio return. It’s a song of obvious contrast, but the writing is decent enough to carry it through. Half full and empty glasses, light in the dark to the beat of soft neo-psychedelic rock adaptations. It’ll not be anything mind-blowing from The Charlatans, but We Are Love is a sweet song of acceptance, an inevitability for legacy act bands.  

But delivered with conviction and it stands a little taller than perhaps it should. Tim Burgess has a strong voice still and has no trouble managing those high notes, while The Charlatans collective has that easy-going rock style with tinges of alternate influence. A nice blur which serves We Are Love well. It’s the groovy midsection and the repetition of the title which work best of all. It has that flat indie rock sound though, an inevitability of the post-Catfish and the Bottlemen craze. Neither tempo nor tone changes throughout We Are Love. Where the changes can be heard is in the lyrical choices, the momentum carried by the back-and-forth of a hopeless present and hopeful future. It’s hard to squeeze more out of that than The Charlatans do on We Are Love, and a nice enough song is what they manage. Catchy work from the group, who find their shows need new material.  

More fodder like We Are Love will appear, then. It’s nice enough work, though not quite mind-blowing. For a song hoping to heal the rift, there is very little in place which could, effectively, be used as an example for how to tie life back together. There is a placidity to their message, a hopefulness which appears, lingers, and remains unresolved. Where we may turn to musicians for answers to all those doubts in life, The Charlatans does not offer that. They are as turbulent as the rest of us, and there is a reasonable, likeable tone from that. Honesty prevails and while most of it is lumped in with generic spills of the heart, those nonspecific irrational acts are devoid of detail because it would remove the room needed for a listener to project themselves onto the song.  

A single outing of this style is fine enough. We Are Love is your likeable but forgettable pub song noise but a whole album of this would be nightmarish. Half-hearted and unfocused is what the album may turn into if it does not offer clearer values or specifics of genuine intent. One song of mystifying quality with intrigue and in-studio excitement washing over the band, is fair game. If it does not develop from here, then We Are Love is a lost cause. It’s a song which can be forgiven for its generalities because its sincerity is unquestionable. The Charlatans are back with some niceness and their branch of rock was always a solid, if repetitive one. It’s nice to hear them back in the studio, but we must hold out hope for more than this.