One to Another

By 1996, the Charlatans had survived label problems and a keyboard player's death and emerged sounding not damaged but tempered — harder and more purposeful, with a swagger that earlier material gestured toward but didn't quite achieve. This track carries the groove of a band who have decided to stop apologizing for their influences and simply inhabit them completely: there is Rolling Stones in the rhythm guitar, there is soul music in the way the beat leans, there is something almost gospel in the momentum of the chorus. Tim Burgess's voice has matured into something with genuine authority — still possessed of that distinctive treble quality, but now delivered with the confidence of someone who has stood on stages through difficult years and learned exactly how much he can trust his own instrument. The production has a live-room warmth to it, instruments sounding like they exist in the same physical space and are listening to each other. The lyric pulses with urgency and rhythm, more concerned with forward motion than narrative detail, which suits the track's fundamental nature as a thing designed to move bodies and elevate mood simultaneously. This is music for the moment a party finds its second wind, for the song that arrives when people had begun to think the night might disappoint them and then suddenly it doesn't, the floor filling again with something that sounds like relief converted directly into dancing.