Fuck the NME. Fuck them right up the arse with a pointy stick. Fuck XFM. Fuck polka dot dresses, new rave and the ‘re-birth’ of indie guitar music, because without all that overblown, empty dollar green garbage, The Cribs new album would be number one for a hundred million years and The Kooks would spontaneously combust in the face of the awesome power of three brothers from Wakefield who write the best songs this fledgling century has seen.
As you might have gathered, it’s hard for me to undersell The Cribs. Their presence in British music is like a little Radio Caroline, bobbing about in treacherous circumstances, battling through the jaunty and the desperate on the airwaves to re-assure you that you’re not going mad. Their first album, ‘The Cribs’, was a DIY effort which burned through 40 odd minutes of adrenaline guitars, shouting and Beatles-esque melodies. It was a gem which was left in the dust as the majors pushed out The Thrills, The Coral and other soft going singalong albums in time for festival season of 2004. The follow up ‘The New Fellas’ was a hook-led classic. Something of a climb down from the rattiness of the first album, but it held chart worthy songs like ‘Mirror Kissers’, ‘Hey Scenesters’ and ‘Martell’ which amused the Radio One playlist for a good few weeks. With Alex Kapranos at the helm, some were expecting a sharper, more poppy album this time round. ‘Men’s Needs’ is anything but a compromise to the current scene. You can hear the influence of Kapranos as vocals are shoved up front, the distortion has been reduced and the hook lines and iron-clad melodies are given a starring role.
More than anything this album is threatening the boundaries of what the indie revivalists expect from a record. There is not one second of filler on this offering, listen to any big seller from The Kooks, The Feeling, The Killers and try and say the same, the words’ll stick in your throat. In fact, it’s difficult to keep a straight face discussing these bands in the same breath as The Cribs, although they’ve been lumped together by every magazine and radio station going. The record starts with the spastic rallying cry of ‘Our Bovine Public’, reducing The Cribs so-called rivals to porridge in the space of 2 minutes and 16 seconds. Any one of the next eight tracks could be a single, horrifically catchy equality anthem ‘Men’s Needs’ has been, and ‘Moving Pictures’, the half mournful, half hopeful tune that feels like you’ve always known it, is the next one out of the bag. The big surprise of the record is ‘Be Safe’, which marries a marching bassline to the spoken words of Lee Renaldo (of Sonic Youth) and a rousing event chorus. It will sneak up on you and assault you before delivering you battered into the end of the album and the warm waters of ‘Shoot The Poets’, a sweet anti-love song with a touching vocal from Ryan Jarman.
In all probability The Cribs will survive the poisoned association with the increasingly generic indie scene, and will still be releasing albums as brilliant as this one when the likes of The View are ‘pursuing other projects’. In the meantime, The Cribs are flicking vs at the bands they recently lambasted on stage at Glastonbury and going off on tour to be with the already converted, who are getting smugger by the minute.
Monday 28 May 2007
Saturday 26 May 2007
The Cribs - Liverpool Academy - 25.05.07
Originally published on Twistedear.com
Remember when pop music used to be fun? Roughly 5 years BC (Before Coldplay) when bands didn’t really care whether they were taken seriously and didn’t date models or actresses because they weren’t really handsome or fucked up enough? Those were good days, and The Cribs are slowly dragging them back.
You won’t catch the Jarman brothers campaigning against climate change, or being papped for Heat magazine, but you will find them pumping out riff-led anthems whilst jumping around and sweating, you know, like bands are supposed to. At the Liverpool Academy Ryan Jarman, on vocals and guitar, wears a constant look of confusion, as if he still can’t believe that this happening to him. He sweats like Joan of Arc and bounds about the stage, oblivious to the plastic jewellery and beer dregs that are being flung onto him. The Cribs have risen in the public psyche with TV appearances, festival headline slots and their new album and single going top 20. But to look at them perform you could be fooled into thinking that they’ve only just graduated from booking their own gigs at the local conservative club. The energy, the hunger, the newness – it’s all still there.
The Cribs have always attracted a healthy mix of indie kids and townies - a bit like Oasis they have that duel appeal that stems from bouncy guitar lines meant for pogo-ing and lyrics that sound apt when they’re being yelled at taxi drivers after 12 pints of Stella. The brothers Jarman are also popular with the ladies – Ryan and Gary are twins but there’s a ‘nice’ one and a ‘dirty’ one, and then there’s little brother Ross, ripe for corruption. One love-struck lady feigns an injury and is taken into the backstage corridor for a rest, only to make a run for it when security’s back is turned. When Ryan hurls himself into the pit as customary at the end of the show, his shirt’s torn up within seconds and feminine screams emerge from the melee. It’s just like the golden days of The Osmonds.
Their first album ‘The Cribs’ was recorded somewhere between a shed and an underpass by the sounds of it. It’s lo-tech to the extreme with bits of odd toy-like effects, outtakes and shouting . Somewhere within each two minute classic a chorus and a hook are dumped in, and against all the odds it works. By the time ‘The New Fellas’ came along the hooks were clearer and the songs fully formed. Singles like ‘Mirror Kissers’, ‘Hey Scenesters’ and ‘Martell’ are their true pop classics and these are still the songs that lead to the most screaming and singing along. Most of the crowd could probably play them more accurately aswell but it just wouldn’t be the same. Rather than balking at the hits, the band revel in them, swaggering and smacking away at their instruments saying with every stroke ‘We wrote this!’.
Now onto their third album, produced by Alex Kapranos, The Cribs have polished their recorded sound but retain that no-frills performing style that makes them such a great live prospect. There are bum notes, inadvertent tempo changes and moments when no-one on stage seems to know what’s happening next. The crowd chimes in with ‘der der der doo doo da da’ which signals that they want to hear the three note riff of ‘Another Number’ from ‘The New Fellas’, and the band start it up dutifully, as if they’re glad of the idea. As a member of the audience one feels like they wouldn’t quite know what to do without our cues, it’s a comforting thought, we’re all in this together.
Down in the venue foyer, minus three pints of sweat but with half a dozen new mates the Crib-ettes are still singing twenty minutes after the band have vacated. A girl is lipsticking her phone number on the bus outside. These are a simple but happy bunch, you could do worse than to join them next time round.
Remember when pop music used to be fun? Roughly 5 years BC (Before Coldplay) when bands didn’t really care whether they were taken seriously and didn’t date models or actresses because they weren’t really handsome or fucked up enough? Those were good days, and The Cribs are slowly dragging them back.
You won’t catch the Jarman brothers campaigning against climate change, or being papped for Heat magazine, but you will find them pumping out riff-led anthems whilst jumping around and sweating, you know, like bands are supposed to. At the Liverpool Academy Ryan Jarman, on vocals and guitar, wears a constant look of confusion, as if he still can’t believe that this happening to him. He sweats like Joan of Arc and bounds about the stage, oblivious to the plastic jewellery and beer dregs that are being flung onto him. The Cribs have risen in the public psyche with TV appearances, festival headline slots and their new album and single going top 20. But to look at them perform you could be fooled into thinking that they’ve only just graduated from booking their own gigs at the local conservative club. The energy, the hunger, the newness – it’s all still there.
The Cribs have always attracted a healthy mix of indie kids and townies - a bit like Oasis they have that duel appeal that stems from bouncy guitar lines meant for pogo-ing and lyrics that sound apt when they’re being yelled at taxi drivers after 12 pints of Stella. The brothers Jarman are also popular with the ladies – Ryan and Gary are twins but there’s a ‘nice’ one and a ‘dirty’ one, and then there’s little brother Ross, ripe for corruption. One love-struck lady feigns an injury and is taken into the backstage corridor for a rest, only to make a run for it when security’s back is turned. When Ryan hurls himself into the pit as customary at the end of the show, his shirt’s torn up within seconds and feminine screams emerge from the melee. It’s just like the golden days of The Osmonds.
Their first album ‘The Cribs’ was recorded somewhere between a shed and an underpass by the sounds of it. It’s lo-tech to the extreme with bits of odd toy-like effects, outtakes and shouting . Somewhere within each two minute classic a chorus and a hook are dumped in, and against all the odds it works. By the time ‘The New Fellas’ came along the hooks were clearer and the songs fully formed. Singles like ‘Mirror Kissers’, ‘Hey Scenesters’ and ‘Martell’ are their true pop classics and these are still the songs that lead to the most screaming and singing along. Most of the crowd could probably play them more accurately aswell but it just wouldn’t be the same. Rather than balking at the hits, the band revel in them, swaggering and smacking away at their instruments saying with every stroke ‘We wrote this!’.
Now onto their third album, produced by Alex Kapranos, The Cribs have polished their recorded sound but retain that no-frills performing style that makes them such a great live prospect. There are bum notes, inadvertent tempo changes and moments when no-one on stage seems to know what’s happening next. The crowd chimes in with ‘der der der doo doo da da’ which signals that they want to hear the three note riff of ‘Another Number’ from ‘The New Fellas’, and the band start it up dutifully, as if they’re glad of the idea. As a member of the audience one feels like they wouldn’t quite know what to do without our cues, it’s a comforting thought, we’re all in this together.
Down in the venue foyer, minus three pints of sweat but with half a dozen new mates the Crib-ettes are still singing twenty minutes after the band have vacated. A girl is lipsticking her phone number on the bus outside. These are a simple but happy bunch, you could do worse than to join them next time round.
Saturday 5 May 2007
Willy Mason - Liverpool Carling Academy 05.05.07
In March 2006 Willy Mason played a sold out show to roughly 300 in the smallest room of Barfly Liverpool. This year the show sells out again, only this time the venue is the 1200 capacity Carling Academy. Such is the draw of the New Yorker whose mix of accessible political anthems and songs about cats has attracted all kinds of music lover to his warm and intimate shows.
Can a show still be intimate when there are 1200 people there? It’s strange but it can. The heat in the Academy is immense but the bar is virtually ignored once Mason hits the stage, with little brother Sam on guitar and Nina Violet on viola. The subject of the tour is Mason’s second studio album If The Ocean Gets Rough, and like other artists he has enabled fans to listen to the album for free on MySpace for the last two months, ensuring none of the killer ‘We Don’t Know This One’ moments which can distract the casual attendee. This tour has been preceded by a series of ‘Living Room’ gigs, where Willy shows up at the house of a fan and plays literally in their living room. Seeing his stagecraft, you can believe that nothing changes between the set in a lounge in suburbia and the set in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire or the Leadmill.
If The Ocean Gets Rough has had a mixed reception by the popular music press in general, who were so pleased with themselves for liking the Grandma’s Basement EP but cooled towards Where The Humans Eat. It’s not a firebrand Willy that has emerged from the hype of the first album and perhaps that’s where the industry criticism comes from – this is personal writing about his Martha’s Vineyard life and his frustrations at the hypocrisy and greed of the modern world. Mason is still only 23, a fact that can be forgotten when he performs so assuredly, and his world is still that of a young American, wondering why his generation can produce such poetry and passion and yet still find a functioning illiterate in the White House. Willy works through the album steadily, throwing in older tracks along the way. There isn’t a huge difference between this album and the last, a fact which has led to criticism from some quarters. What happened though to the idea of constancy? How much can a 20-something’s world view change over 2 years? What does change is the confidence with which Willy Mason tells stories, like the son mourning his father in ‘The World That I Wanted’.
At the Carling Academy the crowd is almost reverential. “He’s fuckin’ brilliant inne?’ remarks one young man, who wouldn’t look out of place on page four of the Daily Mirror with a black rectangle over his eyes and ‘Asbo Teen’ as the headline. To say that the crowd is ‘mixed’ is an understatement of epic proportions. As Mason picks the opening bars of ‘Where The Humans Eat’ (the aforementioned cat song), a fifty-ish white haired man and a pierced emo teenager look at each other with glee as if to say ‘I love this one!’. A few rows in front stands a old school punk next to three shaven-headed lads in tracksuits. Seems that frustration, left wing politics, domestic animals and lilting ballads about the sea make up that elusive uniting force amongst the youth of Britain.
The band’s sound is balmy, full and responsive. Underpinned by gentle resonant bass lines and brush-struck drums the instrumentation rushes back and forth like a dying tide behind Mason’s raw moans. This is the sound of a long-touring band who have had time to adjust to each other and they never falter. After finishing the night with the much loved ‘Hard Hand To Hold’, Nina Violet fiddling for all she’s worth, Mason wanders back on stage to allow one more burst from the choir. ‘Heads or tails; So Long or Oxygen’ he says, flipping a coin. Of course he plays both, because he’s the nicest man in folk.
In the wake of the local elections the doom-mongers who wrung their hands over youth political apathy would have been heartened by the sound of 400 18 to 30 years olds singing ‘Justice, equality, freedom to every race’ at the top of their lungs. ‘Oxygen’, Mason’s own non-partisan manifesto draws the most joy from the steaming crowd. He has a habit of adapting and changing his third verse to ensure that his is the lone voice for at least a part of the sing-a-long anthem, announcing truths like a scruffy statesman while the throngs look on with pride.
Willy Mason – believe the hype and get your tickets early next time, or you might have to depend on him showing up to play in your living room.
Can a show still be intimate when there are 1200 people there? It’s strange but it can. The heat in the Academy is immense but the bar is virtually ignored once Mason hits the stage, with little brother Sam on guitar and Nina Violet on viola. The subject of the tour is Mason’s second studio album If The Ocean Gets Rough, and like other artists he has enabled fans to listen to the album for free on MySpace for the last two months, ensuring none of the killer ‘We Don’t Know This One’ moments which can distract the casual attendee. This tour has been preceded by a series of ‘Living Room’ gigs, where Willy shows up at the house of a fan and plays literally in their living room. Seeing his stagecraft, you can believe that nothing changes between the set in a lounge in suburbia and the set in the Shepherd’s Bush Empire or the Leadmill.
If The Ocean Gets Rough has had a mixed reception by the popular music press in general, who were so pleased with themselves for liking the Grandma’s Basement EP but cooled towards Where The Humans Eat. It’s not a firebrand Willy that has emerged from the hype of the first album and perhaps that’s where the industry criticism comes from – this is personal writing about his Martha’s Vineyard life and his frustrations at the hypocrisy and greed of the modern world. Mason is still only 23, a fact that can be forgotten when he performs so assuredly, and his world is still that of a young American, wondering why his generation can produce such poetry and passion and yet still find a functioning illiterate in the White House. Willy works through the album steadily, throwing in older tracks along the way. There isn’t a huge difference between this album and the last, a fact which has led to criticism from some quarters. What happened though to the idea of constancy? How much can a 20-something’s world view change over 2 years? What does change is the confidence with which Willy Mason tells stories, like the son mourning his father in ‘The World That I Wanted’.
At the Carling Academy the crowd is almost reverential. “He’s fuckin’ brilliant inne?’ remarks one young man, who wouldn’t look out of place on page four of the Daily Mirror with a black rectangle over his eyes and ‘Asbo Teen’ as the headline. To say that the crowd is ‘mixed’ is an understatement of epic proportions. As Mason picks the opening bars of ‘Where The Humans Eat’ (the aforementioned cat song), a fifty-ish white haired man and a pierced emo teenager look at each other with glee as if to say ‘I love this one!’. A few rows in front stands a old school punk next to three shaven-headed lads in tracksuits. Seems that frustration, left wing politics, domestic animals and lilting ballads about the sea make up that elusive uniting force amongst the youth of Britain.
The band’s sound is balmy, full and responsive. Underpinned by gentle resonant bass lines and brush-struck drums the instrumentation rushes back and forth like a dying tide behind Mason’s raw moans. This is the sound of a long-touring band who have had time to adjust to each other and they never falter. After finishing the night with the much loved ‘Hard Hand To Hold’, Nina Violet fiddling for all she’s worth, Mason wanders back on stage to allow one more burst from the choir. ‘Heads or tails; So Long or Oxygen’ he says, flipping a coin. Of course he plays both, because he’s the nicest man in folk.
In the wake of the local elections the doom-mongers who wrung their hands over youth political apathy would have been heartened by the sound of 400 18 to 30 years olds singing ‘Justice, equality, freedom to every race’ at the top of their lungs. ‘Oxygen’, Mason’s own non-partisan manifesto draws the most joy from the steaming crowd. He has a habit of adapting and changing his third verse to ensure that his is the lone voice for at least a part of the sing-a-long anthem, announcing truths like a scruffy statesman while the throngs look on with pride.
Willy Mason – believe the hype and get your tickets early next time, or you might have to depend on him showing up to play in your living room.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
