Ever the contrarians, recently The Cribs recorded a half-hour video interview with Gordon Burns, former host of the 20th century elevated quiz show The Krypton Factor. During it, the veteran is smart enough to let the three brothers do the talking; what emerges is the psyche laid almost bare of a band which are overground enough to play nostalgia concerts and sell out arenas, but still have a deep mistrust of many outside their circle.
To the Jarmans, this antipathy has a neat, linear origin based in ignorance, Gary explaining to camera that their critics feared they were ‘too real…people would tar us with the wrong brush…as an excuse to not have to deal with us’.
It’s a ‘circle the wagons’ narrative which has both made, and to an extent owned, the Wakefield threesome ever since they first broke out from a local nano-scene in 2003, a matter of serendipitous timing on the one hand as they stormed over barricades in the wake of The Strokes and White Stripes, but were then wrongly co-opted into being a part of the ‘New Yorkshire’ movement which heralded the arrival of the Arctic Monkeys and your Kaiser Chiefs.
Their seventh album, 24-7 Rock Star Shit, finds them still biting down hard on the hand that feeds them – the title is a reference to the egotistical diva-world they live in, and summarily reject – and resurrecting the idea of working with legendary American producer/engineer/musician Steve Albini, the man who infamously gave Nirvana’s In Utero its raw meat and rust howl.
Albini’s way of working is to pretty much hit record and see what happens; when a band turns up ‘wanting to sound visceral’, visceral is what they end up sounding like. The feedback squall therefore which opens and closes first song Give Good Time is more than a hint of what’s to come, it’s a manifesto, the song a pile of lo-fi, bludgeoning noise-o-rama that you sense is a marker the band wanted to lay down, a gritty announcement that their fierce existentialism is alive and well.
Just to make sure there were no slipups, 24-7 Rock Star Shit was recorded in the five days it takes most outfits to find out where the studio coffee machine is; it’s not clear whether this sense of urgency makes lead off single Year Of Hate such a classic Cribs-esque condemnation of the rest, but along with the laconic bite of What Have You Done For Me? and the crackling, nihilistic pop of In Your Palace the committed, regular listener is largely on familiar ground.
But here comes the trick; cleverly, the trio choose what they want from the whirl of subjectivity that surrounds the term punk – and refusing to be constrained by some of its nerdy gestalt, they show proof of their supremacy over its form. Little can be deciphered from the lyrical murk of Dendrophobia for instance, but its buzzsaw riff and forehead smashing chorus are things of scuzzy beauty, whilst Sticks Not Twigs is a defiantly vulnerable love song lurking amongst the emotional boulders.
Typically for a band who regard any sort of comfort zone as the route to slow artistic death, there’s also a gleeful curve ball in the synth dominated ballad Dead At The Wheel, an abstraction which seems to revel in the fact that it doesn’t particularly work whilst pushing listeners to decide whether you agree.
At their best, The Cribs make being complicated so disarmingly simple you can forgive them their peth and proclamations. 24-7 Rock Star Shit may be one of their least accessible tracts, but as the longevity of their career shows, it’s far from commercial suicide, taking risks with little more than the stale industry aesthetics they’d already damned to hell a thousand years ago.
