So this is what it comes down to then, when all the debris has cleared? After the rucks, the rocks, the petty theft, the 12 steps, hotelling at Her Majesty’s pleasure, Dot Cotton, Thailand, the great escape, expulsion, court appearances, non-appearances, gig no-shows, arrest, smoking crack in front of countless journalists, candid monologues, bizarre web postings, doubtful tabloid hearsay, the splinter Libertines live sets, the separate interviews, the side-projects, the singles, the ups, the downs, the promises, the spontaneity. This is all we’re left with? Four blokes belting their instruments? Belting them with fractions of competence and varied degrees of decorum in that familiar time-honoured rock straggler tradition? Doing little more, on the face of it, than trying to turn their record collections 3D? Which is all most of us ever want as music fans, so we can touch it, that’s understandable. Only you and I haven’t seen headlines in trillion-selling trash rags like The Sun validating our fantasies. It is difficult to imagine not even a slither of gut-devouring disappointment gnawing away at the most ardent Libertines devotee on a first listen.
This is a difficult record to review. It’s a difficult record to listen to. Even as a detractor, flatly uninspired by the low bar of achievement stumbling messily from your speakers, it’d be short-sighted to discard the poetic grace coursing through its every artery, as car-crash as the subsequent curiosity is. As veiled as the lyrics attempt to be, it’s a mere skirmish with the concept of metaphor and easy enough to draw a straight line to the relevant source. But it is enough of a skirmish to create some beautifully insightful, vivid and uncomfortably charming moments. They’re charred colour polaroids mailed back second class from the front line of a very public addiction, if you can work on the basis that the camera never lies. Maybe the most tragic thing about the words though is that they seem delivered from a distance, removed from the event, like a scripted narration. It’s not like Pete’s absolving himself of involvement, but you do wonder about the psychology of chirping out such dark confessions in the third person.
Stepping away from the music itself for a moment – because the likes of the painful ‘Don’t Be Shy’ and ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ do just collide into one another unevenly and without much consequence – it’s the spiralling, criss-crossing, bordering on homoerotic relationship of the two leading Libs that predictably saves this record. The way they trip over each other’s leads on ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’, ‘Last Post On The Bugle’ and ‘The Ha Ha Wall’, Carl firm and Pete swinging from the beat with the vocal equivalent of double vision, is instinctive, affectionate and engaging, a genuine sounding meeting of mixed up minds.
‘Up The Bracket’ did mature into a near-classic jarring pop record over time, it was in retrospect the sound of them clearing the lip of the hill and beginning to roll. But this eponymous follow-up doesn’t much carry on at pace, rather it’s them balancing precariously on the lip of a precipice, which can be intermittently thrilling, but that’s not the same thing as promise fulfilling. The record is bookended with its two most vital tracks, ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’ and the punchy ‘What Became Of The Likely Lads’ with its pure Libertines “blood runs thicker, ooh we’re thick as thieves you know” mantra, meaning you at least greet and bid it farewell with positivity. ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’ and ‘What Katie Did’ do provide some sweet English pop of substance in between, but where it largely succeeds in circumstance it falls short on content. It might take nothing short of a miracle to get the balance exactly right in The Libertines, it’s sad to say that a clean Pete would probably be as effective as the lifeless stand-in that fills his live shoes as we speak. But you really do hope they get another chance to get it right before it’s too late.