DIRTY PRETTY THINGS Romance At Short Notice (Mercury) Rating: NN
While his former bandmate Pete “doomed” Doherty swings between rehab and prison, Carl Barat’s busied himself laying the ghost of the Libertines to rest. On his second Dirty Pretty Things excursion, he all but achieves it. But when you’re replacing vital infectious riffs with conventional verse-chorus indie rock and grade school poetry, it’s hardly a positive thing.
Buzzards And Crows is a natural opener with its whirly fairground sounds, and The North is a pleasant enough ballad, but when Barat croons, “Yeah, I get the fear, but I couldn’t be bothered” (just one of the many incomprehensibly suburban lyrics in this forgettable collection), the sheer laziness says it all.
