“The deal was done, the trade was rough, Dublin’s down for a double bluff, Dip your quill in your bleeding heart, Sign there and there and there” are the kind of lines The Libertines come up with these days. 11 years after their self-titled album, it seems they have aged gracefully, music-wise. With much more of a pensive vibe to the album, Anthems for Doomed Youth plays out with assurance, at least for the first half.
The first three songs couldn’t have been better; they are sharp, well-composed and bear a decent ratio of good lines per song to convince the listener of their well-being as musicians, especially since that is the red tape listeners will have applied in their minds before consuming the album in the absolute sense. A bad album after eleven years would’ve surely driven their fans into depression, but given the innate composing talents lying within The Libertines, such a downfall couldn’t have been fashioned even if they tried to.
‘Gunga-Din’, inspired by a poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling about a Bhishti who tended to soldiers during the British Raj, finds some of its lines paraphrased in the song. In the original version, the narrator who is a British soldier claims Gunga Din is a better man than him, as even though he was beaten, belted and flayed on various occasions by the soldiers, he tended to the wounded without spite during battle. Both Doherty and Barat narrate instances of their self-destructive behavior and claim that a strong man who, in the face of adversity doesn’t burn out is a better man than them.
‘Barbarians’ and ‘Fame and Fortune’ are catchy tunes replete with pop quality which feature themes that seem to hover around their gratitude at reuniting as straight arrows and resurrecting the band, done up with their idiosyncratic Anglo-poetic sensibility. ‘Anthems for Doomed Youth’ takes the theme forward starting out with “Here’s a story about the rules of death or glory, to be learned by heart by all children of men” and going on to introduce autobiographical lines “we thought that they were brothers, Then they half-murdered each other”.
Their melodies have become richer and although their fragile musical personalities have never been understated in the past, who’d have thought that they’d develop a penchant for ballads. ‘Dead for love’ and ‘you’re my waterloo’ are captivating songs with some decent songwriting “You’ll never fumigate the demons, No matter how much you smoke, So just say you love me, For three good reasons, And I’ll throw you the rope”. Since this is an album where they have given up on their demons, many songs even throw in some wistfulness, including upbeat tracks such as “Belly of the Beast” which bear lines like “Don’t know if I can go on, Making no sense in songs forever and a dog down day”.
Unfortunately, after ‘Iceman’, the songs start shaping into uninspiring avatars of the ones that they had written in their heyday. Apart from ‘Dead for Love’, the second half of the album just doesn’t draw enough blood. The verses in ‘Glasgow Coma Scale Blues’ sound just like ‘Vicious’ by Lou Reed. They perhaps included 4 songs too many for the album to have been the perfect comeback.
The libertines have always written music effortlessly; Pete Doherty’s and Carl Barat’s guitar parts sound like they are playing in their own individual tangents, giving it a natural, unexpected and spontaneous quality. These quirks once lent them an inimitable voice, and it remains intact in Anthems for Doomed Youth.