The Libertines: Up the Bracket
Album Review of Up the Bracket, by The Libertines [2003, Rough Trade]
In "I Get Along," a song from The Libertines' Up the Bracket, the lead vocalist spits out a drunken "fuck 'em." This moment of recorded sound, my friends, is as good a reason to face the day as any. Plus, Mick Jones produced this thing.
You would be hard pressed to make a sounder music purchase than this little slice of heaven. I confess I don't know who's singing what, but both vocalists (Peter Doherty and Carlos Berat) have the whole brilliant indifference thing down pat. I've been advised that some of these guys used to turn tricks in neighborhoods as dank as there are in England. This could be typical New Music Express circle-jerking, but it would not surprise me if true. There is authenticity in the wasted delivery of these songs that is hard to fake. They've been beaten around, for sure.
The record's opener, "Vertigo," implores a flaccid suitor to "climb up to her window ledge or you'll forever be / Walking under ladders as the people round you hear you crying please." This is shit-or-get-off-the-pot kind of stuff, and the music backing it up is full-on adrenal. "Death on the Stairs" makes like a molecule in boiling water with its frenetic drum and bass combo and a chorus of, "Please kill me / Oh baby don't kill me / But don't bang on about yesterday / I wouldn't know about that anyway." The record continues with scads of inebriated poetry of the highest order, and it inspires. "The Boy Looked at Johnny" sounds like a wino looks, but not the kind of wino with the bruises on his face and the exposed genitalia. The good kind, with the porkpie hat. The chorus lets fly that New York is "pretty in the nighttime," but "don't you miss Soho, where everybody goes la de di la de di da diddy." Then it all slumps to the earth with a flailing and defeated "whoo!"
The Libertines mock the record-reviewing process. There's no contrivance here, from what I can tell. These young men were selectively planted in the earth in fertile soil to grow and make this near-perfect record. They will beat your ass, steal your woman (or man), drink your lager, do your drugs and you will call them up next Friday evening to repeat the whole thing. You want me to review an experience like that?
Or to put it another way, this is Record of the Year quality material. I withhold the elusive final virgin only because time is the true arbiter of perfection. This band will produce more greatness, and that is what will draw attention to this work. Attention begets relevance, and relevance is how we determine whether the final virgin gets dusted off and perched atop a review.
Be among the first.
Purchase The Libertines: Up the Bracket online now.
(This review was originally published in 2003 at Smalldoggies online, Version 1)