As a group who’ve always existed with a winning duality of punk and pop at their core, you can often gauge where The Cribs are about to land on that spectrum by the outside hands they’ve enlisted to help guide the ship. On 2017’s raw and grungy ‘24-7 Rock Star Shit’, legendary Nirvana producer Steve Albini sat at the desk. On new record ‘Selling A Vibe’, they decided to throw a curveball by bringing in former Chairlift member and Lil Yachty producer Patrick Wimberley. As guitarist Ryan Jarman told NME last year: “We wanted to try working with someone who specifically worked with more pop kind of people.”
But fear not: the band’s ninth studio album is far from a big, Swift-ian attempt to infiltrate the commercial pop mainstream. Within the first fuzzy-yet-crisp chords of opener ‘Dark Luck’, any longstanding Cribs heads will immediately recognise Ryan’s guitarwork at the helm. However, there’s a sense of intention and precision to these 12 hooky, three-and-a-bit minute offerings that’s undeniably cut from the poppiest side of their cloth. Inside, the Jarmans’ knotty tales still speak of uncompromising values (“Self respect will never cash the cheques…” goes ‘Self Respect’) and troubled mental health (‘Looking For The Wrong Guy’), but the melodies they’re wrapped up in are confident and fat-free.
On ‘You’ll Tell Me Anything’, an Italian operatic tenor belts out the opening phrase – translated to “for a life lived at night” – before Ryan and bassist Gary duet on a track about shedding the darker forces of a career spent on the road. The aforementioned ‘Self Respect’’s spidery bass lines and high end fretwork, meanwhile, arrive into new, almost ’80s-nodding territory for the band. They’re fresh ideas that can slot in seamlessly due to the robustness of the musical language that the trio have built over the past quarter century.
The brothers’ raw, almost-breaking vocals are in full force on ‘A Point Too Hard To Make’, while the one-two of ‘Never The Same’ and ‘Summer Seizures’ – the former, a Beatles-y jangler; the latter, an air-punching slow burn – take classic Jarman qualities but add the lyrical wisdom that only comes with time. It’s the work of a group who’ve managed to grow up without losing their spark. On ‘Selling A Vibe’, the trio are still finding new ways to sound like The Cribs – and that’s a more impressive and unusual feat than it might first appear.
