The Libertines were the best rock band of the 2000s. You’re more than welcome to disagree, but you’re wrong.
They sound like the love children of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards raised from birth in a dark hollow to protect their identities, with nothing but English literature, ’70s rock, and cocaine to sustain them. Sloppy, groovy, mean, and razor-sharp, those of you unfamiliar need to find the Libertines’ debut record, Up the Bracket, and blast that shit on repeat until you’ve absorbed the fact that no other rock from the first decade of the 21st century matters half as much.
That’s right, children: matters. Like the Clash before them and very, very few bands that have come along since, the initial incarnation of the Libertines was important, in no small part because they ruined prefixes. Nothing held. They didn’t play radio rock or pop rock or art rock or garage rock or any other bullshit. They just fucking rocked, safe in their knowledge of the essential truth about rock and roll: that it’s a bunch of nonsense.
Fun nonsense, yes, but diversionary at its core, only worth whatever heart and soul and spirit is ladled into it in the service of having a good time, beyond which who gives a fuck, and why?
And oh, did they have a good time. Co-leaders Pete Doherty and Carl Barat came to be seen as 21st century Glimmer Twins, with Doherty in particular morphing into a generation’s poster child for rock star excess. This guy penned genius lines like “There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap” in “Time For Heroes,” but also broke into Barat’s apartment, stole his friend’s guitars, and pawned them to buy crack. The two later co-authored the self-aware insanity of the Libertine’s eponymous second record, a sort-of concept record that tells the sordid tale of the band’s impending break-up, and within a couple years Doherty was playing one-on-one, “you call it” shows to individual fans in the squat where he lived for drug money.
One of the biggest rock stars in the world, playing private shows in a squat!
Guys, I’m telling you. The albums are there for you to find, and they are what rock and roll is supposed to be. It’s hard to believe the Libertines were an actual band, and that any of this other stuff actually happened, but they were, and it did, and it was awesome.
But, yeah. They broke up in 2005, the band that metaphorically “burnt out.” Doherty and Barat stopped speaking (with good reason) and continued on separately with bands that played music half as good. Those of us who loved “The Boy Looked at Johnny” and “What Katie Did” and “Vertigo” and “The Ha Ha Wall,” among so many others, were stuck waiting on Doherty to get sober, the band to get back together, and psychotic pirate rock genius to tumble back into the world like it did when we were 20 and needed heroes exactly like these batshit motherfuckers.
In late-2014, we got the first two. And on the resulting Anthems for Doomed Youth, which came out this September 11, well…
It’s been 10 years. The Libertines are back (at least for now) in a version that is older, sober, and wiser. These new qualities are good for them personally, but the music itself suffers a tiny bit from the new perspective. The songs are excellent, of course they are, these guys are geniuses, but the authors are no longer mid-20s crazies hell-bent on destruction. Something had to give, and here that something is energy. The Libertines of Doomed Youth come in at a solid 8 out of 10 on the Righteous Scale, whereas in their earlier incarnation they broke the scale, whipped their dicks out, and spat in your face.
Now, I’m not the kind of asshole who would rather his favorite band were a fucked-up mess on the verge of accidental suicide. They seem happier these days, and that’s a good thing. The songs of Doomed Youth (even the snide, sarcastic ones) are imbued with a potent, almost-primal happiness that everyone is alive, healthy, and able to be in a band again.
And in most respects, it’s the same exact band it was before. The literary allusions are here (the title track references Wilfred Owen, first single “Gunga Din” Rudyard Kipling), the lyrical wordplay is top-notch, and the spring-loaded guitar lines often enough leap into a melodic overdriven stratosphere of high-level rock and roll mania. It just might take a record or two before they drop a new classic on us, as the one-time boys in the band figure out what it means to do what they do in this new, more stable context.
Still, like reconnecting in middle age with an old friend whose problems with drugs or drinking threatened to bring him low much earlier, it’s great to hear from the Libertines again, and good to know that they’ve put the past behind them and (again, for now at least) seem intent on going forward together unbound by previous constraints. That puts it on us, then, those 2000s kids who needed a band like the Libertines, who found a match in their completely unhinged take on hallowed musical tradition, to understand that this is the band today, that they’ll never again be the band they were then, and such is the way life works.
In the famous juxtaposition, after all, “burning out” is a euphemism for dying. I, for one, am glad the Libertines are no longer dead. On Anthems for Doomed Youth, they seem to be glad that they aren’t dead too.
Rating: 3.5/5