Pete Doherty refuses to be written off. By now, rock's most famous crack addict should be either just another cautionary tale ("kids, this is your Clash cover band on drugs") or the wasted embodiment of emptily nostalgic hype-mongering ("English journos, raise yr standards!"). And yet if the ex-Libertine's first Babyshambles outing, 2005's Down in Albion, wasn't quite an embarrassment of scruffy rock riches like the Libs' Up the Bracket, it was, more importantly, not an embarrassment.
Doherty's current band's first Parlophone release, The Blinding EP, looked to be a likely tipping point. First, two of its five songs have already been released, "The Blinding" with homeless-sold magazine The Big Issue and "Beg, Steal or Borrow" via MySpace for London's Get Loaded in the Park Festival. Meanwhile, Doherty's latest headlines all have a "last days" feel: dead actors, modeling gigs, a forthcoming TV cartoon ("A Boy Named Pete")...Must've been right about this point when M.C. Hammer wished he'd reconsidered buying that mansion.
Aw, hell. Less workmanlike than fellow ex-Lib Carl Barât's debut with Dirty Pretty Things earlier in 2006, The Blinding EP is just as mired in the backward-looking "rock is back this time, seriously guys" guitar scuffs of 2000s *NME-*dom, when these days even the Strokes are desperately flailing trying new sounds. No major-label reinventions here. Still, Doherty's tortured charm and sloppy melodies make for a record that could sound great in a particularly dank dive after the proper gallonage of Bud Light. Or, as I call it, "Diet Coke".
"On with, on with, on with the show": Doherty's scratchy title track gets innocuous from the get-go, guitars stabbing on the third beat over a loping bass line. Guy's got "things to be getting on with," but this punny transition is the best moment of a song that soon dissolves in stale screams and indecipherable chatter. Finale "Sedative" is soft-loud by numbers, Pixies for punters, and every bit the soporific sop its title suggests. His mind on an indeterminate former hero, Doherty howls, "It's been a long, long time."
But not that long. With wheezy harmonica and a harmony-filled bridge, "Beg, Steal or Borrow" doesn't get any marks for originality, but its skiffley optimism could provide a template for future Arctic Monkeys singles. Guitar-flanged "Love You But You're Green" repurposes "People Get Ready" as a witty reminiscence of troubled youth and imaginary girlfriends.
However, Doherty shows the most lingering promise when he clambers out of Britrock's dull Paddingtons/Kooks sandbox. On "I Wish", his happily miserable take on ska, Doherty moans, "I wish to God that I'd just been stabbed," accompanied by chipper horns and bright Jamaican upstrokes. Fingers crossed for a Baby Cham collab. Babyshambles' shambolic frontman reportedly lives life to extremes, but his music too often plays it safe-- an intoxicated echo of past icons from a man still too (moderately) talented to flame out entirely.
