Up the Bracket (album)

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[edit] Info:

Up the Bracket is the debut album from British band The Libertines, released on 14 October 2002 and reaching #35 in the UK Albums chart[1]. It was produced by Mick Jones (who has also produced other Libertines and Babyshambles material) and released on Rough Trade Records. The album was re-released on 8th September 2003 with additional track, What a Waster, and a DVD, featuring the promotional videos for singles Up the Bracket, Time for Heroes and I Get Along. In April 2008, BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe chose the album as one of his masterpieces, playing the album in full with interviews from the band members, fans and fellow musicians who were influenced by the album.[2]

The title "Up the Bracket" alludes to a slang phrase meaning a punch in the throat, used by British comedian Tony Hancock in Hancock's Half Hour. Hancock is also referenced in the opening track, Vertigo - "lead pipes, your fortune's made" is a line from the Half Hour episode 'The Poetry Society'. Peter Doherty is known to be a life-long fan of Hancock and a member of the Tony Hancock Appreciation Society[3], and has featured in a BBC documentary about Hancock.

Most tracks were composed in 2001 as part of then-manager Banny Pootschi's Plan A to sign The Libertines to Rough Trade Records. The new songs are considerably more noisy and punk than The Libertines' previous sound, in an effort to emulate the commercial success of The Strokes. Only Radio America and The Good Old Days (and extra track Mockingbird) were carried over from their previous repertoire.

[edit] Critical reception:

The album was well received by critics, with the NME rating it 8 out of 10. In November 2009, a panel of musicians, producers, writers and record label bosses for NME's Albums of the Decade list selected Up the Bracket as the best British album of the decade and the second best album of the decade overall. [4]

Below are some press quotes about Up the Bracket:

"Forget all the well-meaning comparisons to good bands present and especially past. Every guitar-based four-piece with enough sidelong flair and I-don't-care gets those nowadays, and these Londoners have more talent and panache than most if not all of them. They're plenty songful if you give them half a chance, which is hard because they conceal such a bewildering wealth of compositional tactics within a fast, loose, lyrical, vulnerable sound that's their own even if they've never given it a moment's thought which is what the sound wants you to think, and which I very much doubt. Let the past take care of itself. They want the world and they want the handcar it's going to hell in. A" - Robert Christgau[5]

"Up the Bracket is the assured debut of the most debauched newcomers on the rock scene for some time: the Libertines." – BBC[6]

"...you'll be hard-pushed to find a more pulsating debut by a Brit guitar band all year." - Manchester Online

"Finally we have a bona fide, modern punk band that actually made it out of high school; a band who've got the spirit and the balls, whose lyrical repertoire extends far beyond the naïve teenage escapades of their love-struck American counterparts." - designerpunk.com

"Not since the Clash has a band evoked so precisely the grime and thrill of young London." - Blender Magazine[7]

[edit] Tracklist:

All songs were written by Peter Doherty and Carl Barât.

- Vertigo (2:37)
- Death on the Stairs (3:24)
- Horrorshow (2:34)
- Time for Heroes (2:40)
- Boys in the Band (3:42)
- Radio America (3:44)
- Up the Bracket  (2:40)
- Tell the King (3:22)
- The Boy Looked at Johnny (2:38)
- Begging (3:20)
- The Good Old Days (2:59)
- I Get Along (2:51)
- What a Waster (2:57) (extra track on UK re-release and US, Japanese, and Australian releases)
- Mockingbird (3:15) (extra track on US and Japanese releases)
- Mayday (1:04) (extra track on Australian release)