The Libertines - The Libertines

The Libertines are probably as well-known for Pete Doherty’s onstage and offstage antics, drug battles and just plain freaky behavior as they are their music. In fact, I’d venture they are actually better known for those things in most circles. But hey, you gotta get a gimmick, and a maligned, strung-out singer is as good as anything, right? The band’s self-titled sophomore album starts out a tad sloppy really, with a bit of slurring and slobbering on the vocals, but it's not really enough to really hurt the overall effect. Slowly though, after the third song, things start to synch up a bit. The “La, la, la, la, la, la” chorus of “The Man Who Would Be King” is super catchy, and the rhythm is groovy, almost in a jam band sort of way but very together. Using a bit of rock-a-billy glam, “Narcissist” is fantastically infectious. Illustrating a pretty consistent comparison that can be made, “What Katie Did” is pure channeling of The Clash and contains the rather strange line “Since you said goodbye/Polka dots fill my eyes/And I don’t know why.” If you dig into the guts of these songs, the lyrics are really pretty telling. There is a lot of verbal tennis going on between notorious singer Doherty and the other part of the dynamic creative force, Carl Barat, and it’s at times quite a nasty game. In “Can’t Stand Me Now,” the men end up shouting the chorus back and forth at one another in clear animosity. One has to wonder if the cantankerous relationship between the two supplies the power of this band or merely exists independently. I mean, just imagine what could have happened if Hall & Oates had actually hated one another…but I digress. Look, when it comes down to it, there are a lot of records out this year that try to cover similar ground as The Libertines, but for sheer variety and manipulation of the recently overdone genre of retro-rock, this is a pretty cool album. [www.thelibertines.com]