Babyshambles

Ever feel like you’ve been cheated? London’s Libertines might’ve left some with that feeling when they finally went kaput in 2004, only having two solid albums to that point, both filled with exciting potential for better days that would never happen. However, it’s often been the cliché that it’s better to burn out than to fade away and certainly the Libertines did the former, while many of their contemporaries from earlier in the decade (the Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Von Bondies) have either quietly broken up or simply seem so much less important nowadays. The much-heralded garage rock revival from the first half of the current decade seems pretty subdued nowadays, if not dead. Perhaps it was just a simple case of hype’s short life or maybe it was because the emperor really didn’t have any clothes (i.e. so many similar sounding bands regurgitating old ideas).

Enter former Libertine Pete Doherty’s fourth LP, Shotter’s Nation, his second with Babyshambles. Here we find Doherty still plucking away at the sounds that the Libertines were trying to resurrect, namely late 70s-era Jam, the crunchy garage rock of the Kinks, a pinch of mid-period Clash, and the working class angst of “Street Fighting Man”-era Rolling Stones. While the Strokes wrote songs in the tradition of some of New York City’s finest (Lou Reed, Television, Richard Hell), Doherty made a point of sounding decidedly British.

However, there is a blurry line between adding classic songs in the vein of your heroes to the pantheon and simply regurgitating their sonic ideas. Doherty has the talent to do the former and has on occasion written some mighty fine songs that have warranted the attention that Mick Jones has put into his bands. However, Shotter’s Nation more often than not finds Babyshambles falling into the latter trap.

The biggest offender in this is probably “Delivery,” the album’s first single. In this familiar tale of a working class boy who works a crummy job during the week and parties like an animal on the weekends, the intention here is clearly to invoke the feeling of 60s rock, since the band went as far as to swipe the guitar riff from the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and added some Rolling Stones-esque backing vocals for the chorus. It certainly makes for a fine single, ably played and performed, but the effect is about the same as when Jet poached Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” a few years back. Granted, rockers have stolen from each other long before Elvis played his first chord, but Babyshambles add little to their source material that wasn’t already there.

The rest of Shotter’s Nation plays out the same. Fine enough songs, played by an able band and sang by a good frontman (who, though technically a terrible singer with little regard to the traditional standards of timing and hitting notes, exudes a charisma that is getting less and less common these days), but rarely rising to the point of being engaging or compelling or to leave a lasting impression.

However, not all on Shotter’s Nation is quite so forgettable. “Carry On Up the Morning” begins the album on a supremely rump-shaking note, using a rhythm that drummer Adam Ficek claimed was inspired by early 90s hip-hop and Soul 2 Soul. Challenging that swanky groove and the Ska-style guitars is Doherty’s sleepy vocals and sad refrain of “It’s not easy getting out of bed,” citing girl problems as the reason for his depressed bout of sloth. Though the song might remind listeners of Doherty’s aforementioned old band (and what’s wrong with that?), it exudes both a hung-over misery and a cheeky irony, given that a song with such a depressed sentiment is so energetic. Elsewhere, “There She Goes” is a piece of jazzy kitsch that features Doherty singing in an accent not his own, while the Oasis-esque Brit-pop ballad “Unbilotitled” features the album’s best lyric couplet: “you say that you love me/why don’t you fuck off?”

The finest moment on Shotter’s Nation is its final song, a downcast acoustic ballad called “The Lost Art of Murder” where the party seems to have ended and Doherty sounds completely resigned. Having been “washed up in paradise,” he muses, “What a nice day for a murder/ The only thing you’re killing is time,” perhaps lamenting opportunities wasted. The most powerful moment of the song is when anger flickers to life in Doherty’s otherwise maudlin tone: “Don’t look at me like that/ She’ll take you back/ Said too much/ Been too unkind/ Get off your back.” On the surface, one might think that the singer is talking to a downcast friend, but the tone suggests that the looks he’s getting are coming from the mirror. Truly, this is a song for the pantheon, but not quite enough to raise Shotter’s Nation far past the average mark as a whole.

In the end, Shotter’s Nation proves to be a frustrating record as the potential from the early days of the Libertines has mostly just remained arguably diminishing potential. What could’ve been the artist of the garage rock revival has turned be just another artist in said revival. Hints of brilliance can be found here, but mostly it’s just the same old.

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