The Libertines - Up The Bracket

A whirlwind ride through seedy London streets, taking in crumbling tenements and decrepit music venues, Up The Bracket is that rare beast of an album that taps into the very culture around it with stunning perceptive clarity.

Charting the formative years of a band destined to destroy itself through drug addiction, infighting and Pete Doherty’s increasingly wayward behaviour the Libertines' debut stands as a monument showcasing all that was stupefyingly brilliant about the band - a snapshot of a group at the very height of their powers before the almost inevitable spiral out of control.

Despite the apparent shambolic overtones Up The Bracket throbs with the chaotic elegance of a Waltzer, dipping, spinning and rolling through a set of songs performed with the raw power of the punch to the face it is named after.

The album’s dazzling centrepiece, Time For Heroes, forms a perfectly constructed vessel for Doherty’s natural storytelling ability covering the struggles of the working classes, his own health problems resulting from cocaine and heroin addiction (“He knows it's eating, it's chewing me up, it's not right for young lungs to be coughing up blood – oh it's all, it's all in my hands, and its all up the walls”) and the sad rise in chav culture destroying his own idealistic, rose-tinted view of England in the 50s and 60s in the immortal line: “There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap”.

All at once this album has the feel of the Libertines' first gig, last gig and best gig rolled into one, and the bum notes and slurring vocals are only bees swarming across the surface of a hive harbouring inside it something intelligently constructed and beautiful.