by Babyshambles
(Parlophone, 2013)
I don’t like British indie rock. I resent the cacophony
of the leaden guitar playing, the pick vituperatively assaulting the strings as
if the indie’ers haven’t worked out that amplifiers are actually rather useful for,
well, amplifying one’s playing. More
so than the sans funk unconscious
imitation of chicken-scratch rhythm guitar, I loathe consummately prosaic Brit-Rock
hacks like Alex Turner who believe you should write only about what you know, as opposed to what you feel . Pete Doherty, however, is an
exception; iconoclastic enough as a performer, a writer and – of late – a Parisian
bohemian expatriate to still hold a certain superiority over the multitude of
groups spawned in The Libertines’ wake who are, at best, as “this’ll do” adequately
uninspiring as Beady Eye. Sequel to the
Prequel is his first album in four years and its perfunctory sensibility
suggests that, although Doherty is certainly a functioning addict, the joys implied by Babyshambles’ rollicking music
might even be actualised were their centric singer-songwriter slightly more
than just functioning.
At this stage, what can be said about Doherty’s heroin
addiction that doesn't lend succour to the tabloid press’ relentless and
sadistic campaign to make everyone forget that he’s, at least in essence, a
musician? I would love to – as with his fantastic 2009 solo album Grace/Wastelands – be able to use Sequel to the Prequel as a riposte to
these facile voyeurs, but it feels as superficial a manifestation of the
familiar Doherty persona as a late-period Rolling Stones record. “Rollicking”
was an adjective I used in the previous paragraph to describe the joie de vivre-imbued
Babyshambles sound, and what music is more rollicking than freshly electric Bob
Dylan, circa 1965? Doherty seems to agree with me, as he plagiarises passages of
I Want You and Maggie’s Farm in a couple of the record’s uniformly derivative
melodies.
Doherty has made a trade of haphazardness, but whilst
Babyshambles’ début Down in Albion was
charmingly strung-out – its evident seams lending it an enjoyable quality of
spontaneity – the relatively polished production of Sequel to the Prequel bears the feel of an effort to dress the artist’s
latest set of ramblings up as “proper” songs, this newly-found sartorial elegance
a futile and distracting embellishment. Again and again Doherty, who seems better
suited to a solo career as a sort of scattershot troubadour, resorts to the
same old bag of melodic tricks; a pinch of Waterloo
Sunset here, an almost wholesale borrowing of the chorus from Where Angels Play by the Stone Roses
there; “there” being on the LP’s true nadir, Maybelline, a tedious amalgam of the usual thrashed riffs and ubiquitous
major-to-minor chord changes. Picture Me in
a Hospital does not deviate much from these over-prevalent re-treads of his
earlier music, but heart-on-sleeve lyrics and, atypically, a violin (substituting
for the jangly guitars one expects to propel its riff) serve to elevate it
beyond said functionality.
This is because, like any formula, the Doherty
songwriting blueprint occasionally works, with the eponymous track a touching Music
Hall bit of frivolity that is all Doherty.
Dr No is altogether less archetypal,
a slice of dark reggae concerning the purchase of some drugs that suggests that
– in a shocking turn of events – perhaps Alex Turner is right, I'm wrong, and
it is better to write about what you
know. Whilst these highlights are certainly vital and thrilling – and the
record does get better as it
progresses – Sequel to the Prequel is
the most disappointing record its focal point has made to date. It’s not
embarrassingly smacked-out, nor is it pathetically polished and mainstream-adulating,
but the middle-ground on which it firmly places itself renders it an uninspiring
addition to the canon of an artist who knows better, and is – surely – capable
of being the purveyor of honest and incandescent rock music he’s always
promised to be, and has, on occasion, shown himself to be.
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