Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 21/11/05
Label: Rough Trade

Now it's okay to admit that the last Libertines album was a bit of a mess, half-cooked by a sleepwalking co-pilot whose contributions were incoherent at best, we can acknowledge that some degree of discipline and rigour wouldn't go amiss this time. With youngsters snapping at his heels, Pete Doherty may be heading back to the building site if he doesn't get it right soon.

Rigour, of course, is probably too much to ask for; The Libertines wouldn't have been half so much fun if they'd been fastidious perfectionists. This time, at least, Doherty sounds a little more together. The voice is still a faintly ambivalent mumble, fighting to be heard against a background of over-enthusiastic noise. His new charges grind out a fairly lumpen soundtrack of influences usually found sellotaped to a student's bedroom wall.

Many of The Libertines' finer qualities are made all too apparent in their absence on "Down In Albion", none quite so painfully as Carl Barat's Django Reinhardt via Johnny Marr charm with a guitar. It's most missed on "Back From The Dead", the "For Lovers" b-side he originally played on, which seems to have been versioned only to highlight the workmanlike nature of proceedings. Here it's given an amateur dramatics reading with chains audibly clanking throughout to labour the point.

There was a time when you might have suspected that Doherty's songs could be put together by any bunch of chancers that he chose to assemble, such was the abundance of magic that tumbled from his pen. The bad news is that all the best on this record, those that made his music and persona such a hypnotic meeting place of nihilism and romance, were written back then: "In Love With A Feeling", "Sticks And Stones", "Killamangiro", "Albion" and "Back From The Dead".

"Albion", the wasted lament for England's poor, love struck by the beauty of the filth around them, gets a turbo-charged version with backing vocals and rather loses the wire-nerved romance of earlier recordings. It's testament to the song's perfection that, despite this, it remains the finest thing here.

The question is, then, has all that promise been pissed up the walls of stuccoed villas in NW1? And, frankly, the odds look grim right now. Meanwhile, stock in "Up The Bracket" continues to rise.

    by James Poletti