{"id":10247,"date":"2024-04-19T15:25:23","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T19:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10247"},"modified":"2024-04-19T15:25:24","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T19:25:24","slug":"all-quiet-on-the-eastern-esplanade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/19\/all-quiet-on-the-eastern-esplanade\/","title":{"rendered":"All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was lukewarm on the Libertines in their brief, drug-addled heyday, and largely oblivious to the drama around their self-titled second album, which looked for a decade like it might be their last, as the band broke up and Pete Doherty was in and out of rehab (and legal trouble). The likely lads returned in 2015 with a third album, Anthem for Doomed Youth<\/em>, which had one great song (\u201cGunga Din\u201d) but a lot of tepid material that couldn\u2019t come close to the energy of their first two records. Even if you didn\u2019t love their songs, those albums crackled with the thrill of a band that always felt like it was teetering on the edge of disaster \u2013 much like Oasis did at its peak, and in both cases it seemed to fuel greater creativity as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last twenty years I\u2019ve come to appreciate the Libertines even more. \u201cTime for Heroes\u201d has long been my favorite of their songs, and \u201cCan\u2019t Stand Me Now\u201d is another banger that also has one of the best album intro passages I can remember hearing, but, taken together, their 2003-04 output feels like they captured a specific moment in British music history. They came along just a few years after the implosion of Britpop, owing something to that genre\u2019s melodic instincts, but their playing was messier, almost dirtier, and they paired it with wry, witty lyrics, bringing some obvious Stones influence along with elements of punk and even \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Libertines returned just this month with their fourth album, their first in nine years, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade<\/a><\/em>, and I think it\u2019s the best thing they\u2019ve ever done. It\u2019s certainly the most interesting new album I\u2019ve heard this year, mixing in styles and sounds we haven\u2019t heard from Carl Bar\u00e2t and Doherty before with that same reckless energy that made their first two LPs so exciting. (I\u2019m not ignoring Cowboy Carter<\/em>, which was nothing if not interesting, but I was shocked by how un-catchy much of that album is.) All Quiet<\/em> is the album that they should have come back with in 2015. It\u2019s a statement record, and just happens to be full of incredible hooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The album opens with one of the lead singles, the incredibly catchy \u201cRun Run Run,\u201d with its winking earworm chorus: \u201cYou\u2019d better run, run, run\/Faster than the past\u201d might just refer to the band\u2019s own sordid history, one would think. It\u2019s a strong choice to start the record, setting the stage for the mostly uptempo songs to come while still sounding very much like the Libertines right from the introductory drum line. It\u2019s one of four tracks on the record that connect this album to the first two, along with \u201cOh Shit, \u201cI Have a Friend,\u201d and \u201cBe Young,\u201d all of which are, to use the technical term, bangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those tracks buy some goodwill for the lads to experiment a little, and fortunately this time around the experiments mostly land. \u201cThe Night of the Hunter\u201d interpolates a bit of \u201cSwan Lake,\u201d of all things, while managing to sound like it came from the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly<\/em>. \u201cOh Shit\u201d starts with a guitar lick that sounds so familiar \u2013 an inverted version of the main riff from \u201cBoys Don\u2019t Cry?\u201d \u2013 and never takes its foot off the gas. \u201cShiver\u201d is not a cover of the Coldplay song, but instead is a swirling, psychedelic track that\u2019s unique in their catalog for its melding of that \u201870s psychedelia with some of the 1990s Britpop that paved the way for their initial success, and hearing the lads sing about \u201cReasons to stay alive\/Not to die at 25\u201d should certainly bring to mind the unlikeliness of this band still being intact twenty years on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn\u2019t totally get on board with the closer, \u201cSongs They Never Play on the Radio,\u201d although the fact that the Libertines utilized a backing chorus on several tracks also marks some of the band\u2019s progression into this older, wiser status. \u201cMan With the Melody\u201d is just a miss, one where I can\u2019t even see the vision in what feels like a throwaway track in both music and lyrics, and \u201cBaron\u2019s Claw\u201d also kills some of the momentum built up by the prior two tracks. \u201cMerry Old England,\u201d however, shows the Libertines slowing down the tempo while still managing to incorporate a strong hook, with some of their best lyrics ever, appropriating the language of the xenophobic right<\/a> \u2013 even stealing a headline from The Sun<\/em> about \u201cillegals\u201d \u2013 to cover the plight of migrants coming to England in search of a better life, only to receive \u201ca B&B and vouchers for three square.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Libertines have now scored their second #1 album in the UK with All Quiet\u2026<\/em>, after their self-titled sophomore album did the same in 2004, but their commercial success has been limited to Britain and they\u2019ve barely made a dent in the U.S. It contributes to an underrating of the band\u2019s importance in music history, as they were critical in the resurgence of rock music after the death of Britpop in the late 1990s ushered in an era of more commercial pop and less rock-oriented indie pop acts like Coldplay and Travis. Without the Libertines, do we get the Arctic Monkeys, who have a very similar sound but cleaner production and playing, and take Doherty & Bar\u00e2t\u2019s witty lyrical style to another level? Or Franz Ferdinand, the Wombats, Jamie T, the Rills, or Sports Team? The Libertines\u2019 original two albums were part of a brief revival of garage-rock \u2013 often mislabeled as post-punk because they kind of played fast \u2013 that opened the doors for multiple waves of Brit-rock after their initial breakup. Let\u2019s hope that this album gets them their due beyond the shores of merry old England.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was lukewarm on the Libertines in their brief, drug-addled heyday, and largely oblivious to the drama around their self-titled second album, which looked for a decade like it might be their last, as the band broke up and Pete Doherty was in and out of rehab (and legal trouble). The likely lads returned in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1374,748,778,161,167,852],"class_list":["post-10247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-in-music","tag-british-music","tag-garage-rock","tag-highly-recommended","tag-indie","tag-music","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10248,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10247\/revisions\/10248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}