Send "Peter Doherty " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Ew |
 Somehow amid all the tabloid baiting, Pete (sorry, ''Peter'') Doherty still finds time for songwriting. On his first solo CD, Grace/Wastelands, he conjures an understated and fantastical vision of his homeland in which jazzy meditations on the 1930s bump up against haunted fairy-tale folk. B+...full text |
| Avclub |
| Is Pete Doherty destined to spend the rest of his life as an intermittently brilliant, more than slightly sad pop icon? Will he be like Harry Nilsson or Shane MacGowan: capable of greatness, but too frequently undone by his own bad habits? If so, Doherty’s Grace/Wastelands—his first solo effort, following two LPs each with The Libertines and Babyshambles—may well be remembered as a rare case of him pulling it together enough to justify his cult. Walking that narrow, precariously winding path between casually cool and completely collapsed, Grace/Wastelands finds Doherty digging some of his best previously unrecorded songs out of the trunk and recording them with producer Stephen Street and Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, among others. It’s a quiet record by and large, where the loudest sound on any given track is Doherty’s woozy, slurred voice, singing about the faded glory of old England with the relaxed command of a wizened cabaret act. Listeners who aren’t already in sync with Doherty’s wastrel reportage likely won’t be swayed by Grace/Wastelands, but the album generates an atmosphere of fragile, easily disturbed calm bound to captivate those who still find him one of the most compelling figures in modern rock....full text |
| Musicomh |
| Few pop stars can say they've occupied quite the position Pete(r) Doherty holds in the public consciousness, where everyone knows his name but 99.99 per cent of them couldn't whistle one of his tunes if they were offered a million pounds to do so. This is, of course, the public's loss as whatever else Doherty might be - or have been - he is a superb lyricist and songwriter, his fractured melodies and romantic dreams the ultimate in acoustic heroin chic, weaving tales of a world Brett Anderson dreamed about but never really paid the rent in. Grace/Wastelands, his first official solo effort, picks up more or less where Babyshambles left off except that he has dusted down his worst excesses, taken a long hard look in the mirror and is sighing long and hard with a slightly broken heart. If there is one sentence that can sum up the progression of Doherty's solo album from his work with Babyshambles, it is this: the mood suggests that, for the first time, he might just have lost the hope in his hopeless romanticism. Fractured and vulnerable, the world has kicked back, harder than he expected and he's no longer too doped up to ignore the pain. Aided by Graham Coxon on guitar, most of Babyshambles (Adam Ficek on drums, Drew McConnell on bass, Mik Whitnall on guitar and even former collaborator Dot Allison on Sheepskin Tearaway) and with the Duke Strings adding chamber gravitas, Doherty is more together on Grace/Wastelands than he has ever been. Rather than dull his fire, this enables his embers to smoulder with a slow burn that realises a potential he has long been in danger of throwing away....full text |
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