Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

The Libertines
Time for Heroes: The Best of the Libertines
(Rough Trade, 2007)

So this is the band the crack smoking, kitten abusing, baby-faced elf warrior known as Pete Doherty rocketed to fame in. What a disappointment. They’re just another cheeky Brit-pop group tossing off boring, histrionic guitar lines and half-spoken vocals. How come the most insane rock abusers are always in the weakest bands? Perry Farrell, Evan Dando, this Doherty cat… how does crack not force songwriters to create hyper, super-aggressive music along the lines of Bad Brains or Minor Threat? This sonic pabulum does not sound like the brainchild of anyone with increased blood pressure/adrenaline. Maybe everything I learned in high school Health class was a complete lie (or I just wasn’t paying close enough attention).

I’m also slightly offended a band with only two full-length albums to its credit has released a “Best of.” I guess you can get away with all kinds of shady stuff when you’re dubbed one of the most influential acts of the past decade. Seems like NME crowns a different band every six months with that title. That’s England for you—over-hyping everything. Anyone who picks up a guitar in that country could be dubbed the Second Coming by the excitable music press. I’d kind of like to send a chimp with a six string over there and see how quickly Bonzo can get a gold record. Wait a minute—that already happened once—Lancelot Link and the Evolution Revolution. Okay, I’m not sure it went gold, but that all-chimp band’s bubblegum pop record was pretty damn popular.

To these hype-wary American ears, the Libertines are just a pastiche of the Strokes and the Jam, which is kind of like mixing Kool-Aid and Hawaiian Punch. It’s sugary, it’s sweet, and it’ll give you a stomachache after two gulps. I don’t care what those twits say about Doherty and his posse introducing the iPod generation to Oscar Wilde and touching off a new generation of poets. Nike introduced me to the Stooges, but you don’t see me wearing their silly swoosh-emblazoned shoes. We don’t need scab-covered model daters to remind us how awesome The Importance of Being Earnest is over on these shores, thank you very much.

There are a couple of crisp attempts at Oasis on this “Best Of” that are kind of cute— namely, “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun” and “What Katie Did.” They fall short of even the weakest Gallagher Brothers B-side, but hey, at least the Libbys took a stab. Otherwise, Time for Heroes offers nothing later acts such as the Arctic Monkeys and the Fratellis didn’t improve upon. Now those guys sounded like real crackheads.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]