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Review: Carl Bar̢t and The Jackals РLet It Reign

★★☆☆☆

Two stars
 
In December, British garage rockers The Libertines announced they were working on a new album, over ten years since their last record, which may rather have dulled any excitement over the new solo effort from co-frontman Carl Barât.
 
With or without the anticipation he might have liked, it’s here, and sounds exactly like you would expect a Carl Barât album to sound by this point – at least a Carl Barât album with all the notches turned up to 11. Punky, distorted guitar chords rarely leave the foreground, and Barât’s vocals rarely drop below a rasping shout. It all kicks off pretty well – ‘Glory Days’ boasts a lovely, jagged riff that would have found a space on a Libertines record, and the horns that pop up in the bridge of ‘Victory Gin’ work nicely with the track’s crescendo.
 
Unfortunately, after fifth track ‘Beginning to See’, a solid acoustic guitar-led break from the ruckus surrounding it, things start to get a little tired and formulaic. The choruses of ‘March of the Idle’ and ‘We Want More’, obviously designed to be catchy and anthemic in their repetitiveness, just sound uninspired, and really nothing here holds a candle to anything Barât’s other projects achieved – it’s telling that despite only being 35 minutes in length, it runs out of steam at the halfway point. Better just to stick with The Libertines, and hope the new album offers something less predictable than this.
 

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