(Choon Online, March 22, 2009)
Album review
It must be an accident that the artist formerly known as Pete Doherty has named his album twice. But as he appears to be in the throes of a somewhat pretentious identity crisis, perhaps his duelling duality required it.
As the first Pete(r) Doherty solo effort, it’s not that solo - that’s what occurs to anyone who scans the sleeve notes. Collaborators include Peter ‘Wolfman’ Wolf, Dot Allison, Graham Coxon, members of Babyshambles and even a co-writing credit for his old mucker Carl Barât, intimating maybe that the talents of others are still propping Pete(r) Doherty up.
As far as the music behind the myth, it starts out well enough. Opener ‘Arcady’ is a folk-flavoured, country-tinged road song. “In Arcady, life trips along,” he offers, with a nod and a jaunty tip of his hat. In all honesty, Pete(r) Doherty’s fag-ravaged voice sounds a little too grimy for the clean melodic rhythms on show, but he makes a nice fist of the ditty, and keeps alive the idea that everything he writes is about Carl with lyrics like “Now you know more than your teacher“.
In fact, lyrically speaking Mr. Pete(r) ‘it was all fields round here’ Doherty hasn’t moved on terribly far from his days with the Albion-citing Libertines and Babyshambles. He actually seems to live in an England of Camberwick Green and Hancock’s Half Hour - a fantasy in keeping with his self-styled Byron posturing.
The fixation is first reinforced with the aptly-named ‘Arcady’, but followed so closely by single ‘Last Of The English Roses’, the whole thing starts to whiff of nostalgia porn. By the time it comes to ‘1939 Returning’, you’re begging for him to reference modernism in some shape or form. The noirish co-Barât penned ‘A Little Death Around The Eyes’ has something, but it’s fleeting at best until ‘Broken Love Song’, the album high point.
Fostering the same tragic intimations as Neil Diamond’s ‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’, it is tragic and lovely and right right right - and proof that Pete(r) Doherty does have something. It’s just often buried under the facade of the ‘artist’.
Pete(r) Doherty’s portrayal of himself as the raconteur, the gent, the badinage artist with a twinkle in his eye is sorely lacking, an artless artist. Grace/Wastelands has some skill, but the overriding feeling is of a collection of offcuts and also-rans dumped carelessly on a record-buying public who are here to listen.
Like all efforts of style over substance, it has been found wanting.
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