Album: Dirty Pretty Things <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

Waterloo to Anywhere, VERTIGO

While Pete Doherty hogs the headlines and fits in a little music between his dates with m'learned friends, his former Libertine chum Carl Barât has been quietly woodshedding with his new band Dirty Pretty Things, playing in far-off corners and disdaining the attentions of the tabloids. "I wanted to keep it about music and not about all the other nonsense," Barât claims; but ultimately, what Waterloo to Anywhere demonstrates is that, shorn of the "other nonsense", there's not a lot to The Libertines' legacy. By Barât's logic, this should be so much better than Babyshambles'Down in Albion, but at least that album had an engagingly mad spirit and primal desire that's entirely lacking from this drab affair, which fails to pique one's interest whether he's singing about domestic abuse, the sex industry or the fallout from the Libertines split. The music is quite woeful: apart from "If You Love a Woman", which has a spindly, abrasive quality akin to The Magic Band, there appears little interest in anything beyond the most basic meat'n'spuds indie guitar-rock - a lack of ambition that comes through loud and clear. And dull.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'If You Love a Woman', 'The Enemy'