Babyshambles - Down In Albion

If there’s anything that could completely dismantle the notion that Pete Doherty is a legitimate artist, then Babyshambles Down In Albion is it. There’s little in it that points to any hint of creativity, talent, or musicianship. Instead, it sounds like a professionally recorded demo tape of a bunch of junkies trying to keep from nodding off before the end of the take. Indeed, reading about Doherty’s exploits in the tabloids is ten times more exciting than the material presented here.
Seriously: it’s so frighteningly bad that everyone should take a reprieve from even thinking about Doherty and avoid covering his activities, no matter how unbelievably stupid they may be.
Notes barely get played, phrases get slurred, and tempos are sporadic; even if Down In Albion is intended as some kind of clever statement on junkiedom, it fails to consider the sad truth that most junkies (and drunks, for that matter) are pretty boring individuals to be around, let alone listen to.
Not only does Down In Albion effectively place Pete Doherty is the nearly irrelevant category, it’s so unbelievably awful that it almost makes you forget that producer Mick Jones was once an important creative element of The Clash. Actually, there’s no hint of “production” at all; Babyshambles are allowed to waste precious tape with half-baked song fragments and loose ideas that any normal producer would have thrown out before hitting the record button.
Totaling out at 16 tracks, you lose interest well before the halfway point. And if you’re curious about which songs out of the sixteen are, at least, decent, then you’d be surprised to learn that one, that’s right, one song is fairly good. The perfectly decadent “Fuck Forever” serves as the veritable theme for the entire album as well as an anthem for junkies everywhere.
A few other tracks (“Albion,” “Pipedown,” “Loyalty Song”) stumble through completion, while the rest are the equivalent of watching the snow on an old analog television with a coat hanger for an antenna.