The Charlatans: Wonderland

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Having survived many an event that would have been the end of lesser groups, the Charlatans remain Britrock's quiet achievers, again showing their deft touch with guitar- and keyboard-powered, soul-laden grooves on this, their seventh album.

Sometimes their stylistic lifts do stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, like the Curtis Mayfield figure behind Love is the Key or the Sly Stone inflections to I Just Can't Over Losing You.

But that doesn't stop singer Tim Burgess and his cohorts creating something infectious when it's in electronically enhanced, wobbly bottomed dance-rock high-gear (as on opener You're So Pretty, We're So Pretty) or something quite lovely (the falsetto-voiced and pedal steel-decorated A Man Needs To Be Told) when it heads into moods more languid.

Yes, it can sound like an echo of the early-90s Stone Roses-Happy Mondays "baggy" era. But the Charlatans managed to make it sound like an unruined idea.

Label: (Universal)