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21 hours ago
9
Last summer, the BBC broadcast an eight-part podcast called The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze. Its third episode heavily featured the Cribs’ bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman talking about his band’s first flush of mid-00s fame. It centred on their 2005 single Hey Scenesters!, from which the episode also took its name. It was a curious choice: on close examination, Hey Scenesters! wasn’t a celebration of what some people unfortunately dubbed the New Rock Revolution so much as the sound of Jarman and his bandmate brothers poking fun at it.
There was the peculiar dichotomy of the Cribs in a nutshell. They were a band so of the mid-00s moment that they were nearly signed to a record label founded by Myspace. But they always seemed slightly apart from the scene. They were certainly less voracious in the pursuit of mainstream success than contemporaries Razorlight or Kaiser Chiefs: “A cash injection, a nasty infection – don’t regret it,” offers a song from their ninth album, Selling a Vibe, with the pointed title Self Respect. They were more in tune with what their sometime-producer Edwyn Collins called “proper indie” from a pre-Britpop age, when “indie” indicated not a predilection for skinny jeans and trilby hats, but something set apart from the mainstream that viewed the attentions of Top of the Pops and the tabloid press with deep suspicion and balanced limited commercial ambitions against artistic freedom. It was a point underlined by the kind of artists who gave them co-signs. Quite aside from the former frontman of Orange Juice, there was Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Johnny Marr – who briefly joined the Cribs, co-writing 2009’s Ignore the Ignorant – and the late producer/engineer Steve Albini.
That slight sense of distance served the Cribs well. Unlike their peers, they never met with vast success – their records sold respectably rather than astonishingly well – but they kept having Top 10 albums long after Britain’s 00s alt-rock vogue passed. The lyrics on Selling a Vibe regard their past with a rueful eye – unmistakably the tone of a band who dug in for the long haul some time ago and have been through some tough experiences. The spectre of a legal battle with their former label haunts the title track and You’ll Tell Me Anything (the band got back the rights to their first five albums), while Summer Seizures and Looking for the Wrong Guy deal with a certain loss of innocence: “The good times never last” avers the former; “ain’t it a shame tomorrow finally came?” opens the latter, before reflecting on “the folly of youth”.
But 22 years on from their eponymous debut album, the Cribs are still going and, on the evidence of Selling a Vibe, wearing their longevity and elder statesman status rather well. There’s a certain confidence about the album’s sound. It won’t surprise anyone conversant with the Cribs’ oeuvre to learn that it deals in distorted guitars and sharp, punchy songs. Produced by Caroline Polachek’s former Chairlift bandmate Patrick Wimberly, it feels a little more streamlined than its predecessor, Night Network: there’s a faint 80s pop sheen to A Point Too Hard to Make and a drum machine pulse underpinning Rose Mist, but it’s not a radical departure. What is striking is how uniformly well-written and powerful the songs are. Time and again, they hit a perfect balance: nothing here feels slick or overworked, but the melodies soar, the choruses hit, everything clicks faultlessly. If Selling a Vibe was a debut album, people might well be working themselves into a froth about it, but then again, it’s unlikely the songs here could be by a new artist: they speak of experience, the product of a band who have worked out exactly what they do and how to do it.
The lyrics suggest the Cribs know that the position they occupy – longevity, a solid cult following, refining rather than reinventing – isn’t the stuff that grabs headlines or provokes hyperventilating excitement: “In these days of excess, the shortest stories are the sweetest,” notes Distractions. Equally, Selling a Vibe implies a band battered by experience but rightfully contented: as the roll call of forgotten contemporaries mentioned during that indie sleaze podcast underlined, there are far worse fates. The album ends with Brothers Won’t Break, a song that celebrates fraternal relations among the Jarman siblings and ponders men’s difficulties with sharing their emotions, but ultimately feels like a hymn to the Cribs’ durability: “After all this time holding the line, we weren’t ever going to leave it … we’ll keep it from an honest place.” They sound happy with their lot. Who can blame them?
This week Alexis listened to
Augustin Bousfield – Love Corruption
St Etienne collaborator and self-styled “Bradford synthpop keytarist” melds old-school electro and fizzing hyperpop to cobweb-blowing effect.
