In Carol Reed’s classic film The Third Man, Orson Welles’ slippery anti-hero Harry Lime justifies his descent into criminality by comparing the cultural output of Renaissance Italy during the turbulent rule of the Borgia family with that of Switzerland. The Swiss, he concludes, “had brotherly love and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” It is a reference that the Libertines, with their love of fading Albion, would surely appreciate, though perhaps not when directed at All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, their second album since reforming in 2010.
During the Libertines’ first run, from 1997 to 2004, the band thrived on a perilous creative chaos, driven by the love/hate relationship between founding members and principal songwriters Carl Barât and Peter Doherty, plus London bus-loads of hard drugs. Unhealthy though it undoubtedly was —Doherty, famously, was jailed for burgling Barât’s flat and the pair needed bodyguards to keep themselves apart during the recording of their second album—this tension produced a thrilling, white-knuckle-scrape of a debut and a follow-up that intermittently sparked on its way to the top of the UK charts. In keeping with this tempestuous history, the band’s third album, 2015’s surprisingly vital Anthems for Doomed Youth, was “born of complexity,” according to Barât. This leaves All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade as the first Libertines’ LP to spring untroubled onto wax.
For anyone who grew up on the Libertines, it’s hard not to root for them. And yet initial signs here are far from promising. “Run Run Run”—the lead single that, ironically, is about trying to escape the past—uses the well-worn line “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to” within the first 30 seconds. Its meat-and-potatoes indie rock doesn’t get much more inspired from there: The line between a good Libertines song and a bad one remains perilously thin. “Night of the Hunter” goes a step further, filching not just its title (from Charles Laughton’s 1955 noir masterpiece) but also its central motif, in this case from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a borrowing better left unheard. On “Oh Shit,” the Libertines rip off themselves with a spiraling guitar riff that’s a near copy of their 2003 single “Don’t Look Back Into the Sun.”
What are the Libertines without their central tension? Not that different, perhaps, to the Britpop bands they followed into the charts or the legions of wannabes they inspired in the early 2000s, which is to say very much in the classic British rock lineage of the Kinks, the Jam, and the Smiths, albeit without the wistful beauty, artful fury, and naive experimentation of all three. There are moments on this album that speak to a band that once embraced its idiosyncrasies. “Baron’s Claw” has a touch of hot jazz in its sprawling trumpet lines, while “Be Young”’s excursion into reggae is interesting, if not entirely rewarding, helped by the fact that Gary Powell is one of indie rock’s smartest drummers.
These points of interest are outweighed by a run of well-crafted but derivative indie-pop tunes where melodic smarts meet copybook songwriting. “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” borrows the title of a well-regarded 1992 biography of Nico and sets it to a swooning, downbeat melody, while “Man With the Melody” could be latter-period Blur with its twinkling strings, acoustic guitars, and craftily descending, Albarn-esque melody. It’s a perfect illustration of All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade’s central conundrum: The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.
This album is no Renaissance masterpiece, then. But it’s not quite Harry Lime’s cuckoo clock either. Stripped of their fraternal bad blood, the Libertines are just a band—and a decent one at that. But, as All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade chugs to its chummy finale, you do almost wish that someone would start burgling someone, if only to see what happens.
