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This is easily the best-sounding album Doherty has been involved with, neither self-consciously "raw" nor overly polished; it lets the music be as simple or as elaborate as it needs to be.
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Alternative PressThe man's always had his tender side: What makes this album different is the lack of input from his other sides. [May 2009, p.121]
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Solo debuts, beginning with 1970's McCartney, generally lay themselves bare. Grace/Wastelands does, with the same irresistible UK melodicism begun by the British Invasion's big bang.
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BlenderThe closest his polite bum comes to tearing loose is when he gives his music-hall skiffle a Dixieland bounce. [Apr 2009, p.80]
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It's an intelligent, beguiling and charming record, from a man who has often seemed to lack all but the first of these qualities, and the first thing he's done since The Libertines' debut to make you feel genuine hope for his future.
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Pete Doherty has made a solo album with Stephen Street producing, and the result is some pretty good music.
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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.
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He doesn't quite succeed, though in the process of failing, he turns in his most restrained and focused recordings to date.
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MojoIt's the songs--funny, literate, doomed--which get under your skin. [Apr 2009, p.100]
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Grace/Wastelands is Doherty scrubbed up, older and wiser and showing signs of regret for the past. It is a great album but then, so have they all been.
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Grace is less a masterpiece than an escape, a memento of his charisma and charm more than a leap towards new horizons.
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Consider Grace/Wastelands more of a step in the right direction, a sign that maybe all is not lost and he can turn things around yet.
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Problem is, the more traditionally reflective Grace/Wastelands just manages to make his solipsism double over on itself and your memories of listening to "Up the Bracket" are more rewarding than his memories of making it.
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It essentially exposes Doherty’s biggest weaknesses: his trite lyrics, his less than perfect voice, and his inability to sound interested in anything he’s doing not under the title "Libertines."
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Q MagazineGrace/Wastelands isn't quite the defining statement of his genius that his cheerleaders always insisted was just around the corner, but it demolishes the charge that his talent has been fatally squandered. [Apr 2009, p.98]
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Peter doesn't quite have a full batch of tunes here--the weird, World War II–themed '1939 Returning' is one of a few songs that could use an actual chorus--but for much of the album he manages to make his dysfunction sing.
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Grace/Wastelands is a pleasant, downright breezy collection of songs and Doherty, excepting the dreamily ragged quality of his voice, sounds something like a new man.
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In a narcotized haze of lounge blues, New Orleans jazz, gauzy retro soul, and understated guitar pop, he has made the most compelling record of his career.
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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.
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There are tracks here that date back five years, before the tabloids turned up and Pete became Potty. That might account for the album's frankly astonishing surfeit of memorable tunes; it would certainly explain the lack of smirking references to heroin and crack and of the snivelling self-pity that makes junkies such reliably delightful company.
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It will, rightly, go a long way to repairing Pete Doherty's reputation as a singer and songwriter of note. But half of it is a bit boring.
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Under The RadarBasically, Grace/Wasteland is Doherty as strolling minstrel. [Spring 2009, p.71]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 30
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Mixed: 2 out of 30
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Negative: 2 out of 30
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DBApr 10, 2009
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JohnP.Apr 1, 2009
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Mar 14, 2012