Every week, when you read about "This is definitely it, we're splitting the fuck up", you were gutted, even though you knew that, shit, it'll be solved in a half-hour most likely. The music was so good, the band so amazingly consistent, that it stung to think they wouldn't release anything again.

It's the same thing with these cats The Libertines. Listening to Music When The Lights Go Out, what brings to mind Radio America from Up The Bracket, although this is structurally more accomplished, The Duke can't help but put the euphoria on hold for a second and say shit, Libertines, y'all better sort this shit out because this is too special, too uncommon for to be tossed about like some piss-drenched rag.

An album with not a single fast-forward is a rarity these days. Even that album about Fuck You, I Don't Ever Want You Back, even that opus of doo-wop and swearing and misogyny, even it had tracks that made you wanna hit the arrows for to go to the next one.

Not here, man. There's nothing you don't wanna hear. Except you might pause it some times to catch your breath. It hurts like hell to grin for so long. Even when they get all sad on you, even then you still grin in the way you were warned about when you were a kid. Don't be grinning in such a manner, you were told, Satan gonna leap up like a motherfucker and grab you by the nuts for to take you to Hell as of the right now. Well, Satan's gonna be rubbing his hands like never before when this record is released, let The Duke be the first to announce. That amount of smiling across the land, that must be indicative of an apocalyptic level of impurity running through the skulls of man.

So what more do you need? You want The Duke to tell you about the musical nuances, the nods to The Kinks that are even more pertinent this time around, the fact that a song by the name of Campaign Of Hate opens with a bass line that almost, almost, makes a man think of Winona's Big Brown Beaver by Primus? Or how that self same song is not about puns regarding genitalia, but actually serves to be yet another slab of uplifting tune-smithery, with a hook line that's so cool a motherfucker's tongue would stick to it.