It might be hard to believe, but a couple of years back, Halo-17 had an actual editorial policy that reporting on Pete Doherty's personal life was no longer allowed. We could have taken the moral high ground and claimed that we weren't interested in reporting on the embarrassing failures of a man obviously in over his head when it came to drugs, but to be honest I think it was because the editor got sick of us scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to drug jokes.

So, when it came to writing this review, and I was promised "Pete Doherty as you've never seen him before," I immediately thought to myself "What, sober?" Realising with glee that I could probably slip that in my review, I immediately sat down with his new solo album "Grace/Wastelands", eager to hear what Pete has been up to since the last time I was allowed to report on him.

As it turns out, songwriting and music practice probably weren't too high on the list. At least when he was a semi-permanent drug addled haze, John Frusciante was able to turn out some interesting material that proved that while heroin is shockingly bad for your health, at least it can provide some good songwriting fodder. Doherty, on the other hand, has settled for a batch of half arsed throwaway tracks that prove nothing except that even when he's supposedly off the gear, he's still a tremendously inconsistent songwriter.

To be fair, it can't all Doherty's fault, because Graham Coxon of Blur and Stephen Street have also had a pretty big hand in the mess that is "Grace/Wastelands". Everything is stripped down to being acoustic only, and the preferred mode of operation is Doherty's mumbly acoustic demo technique, rather than the tight and concise modus operandi that he achieved with The Libertines. This leads to tracks like Arcady and A Little Death Around The Eyes, which sound like very poor copies of the pastoral psych-folk that early Pink Floyd used to occasionally engage in. Sadly, most of the album consists of this.

There are a couple of highlights though, which remind us that Doherty can occasionally come up with a good tune. Last of the English Roses has been correctly lauded by critics as an example of what can happen when he's firing on all cylinders, the staccato acoustic guitar and rambling lyrics working together quite well for once. If Doherty were able to make an album full of songs of this quality, more people would become interested in his musical abilities than his personal life, but unfortunately on this album it's only a flash in the pan. Maybe he needs Carl Barat there to pick out the gems and tell Doherty to leave the rest of his music on the cutting room floor.