The Cribs: For All My Sisters (Sonic Blew/Sony Red)
The latest from Wakefield's Jarman brothers is a showcase for everything that's bad about the glut of indie guitar bands that keeps on coming in the wake of Britpop. It's another rung down the quality ladder from 2012's In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull and proof that the brief appointment of Johnny Marr to their ranks during the Ignore The Ignorant years was little more than light brake pressure applied to an inevitable decline.
Ryan Jarman's guitar makes a genuinely unpleasant squall on opener Finally Free but it's sweet music compared to his overstretched vocals. There's often too much guitar in the mix and only on track four, Mr Wrong, do things come right when twin brother Gary's bass takes a better grip of proceedings. Elsewhere the songs range all the way from utterly tuneless to merely adequate, while Simple Story could pass for the demo version of a rejected B-side.
In the past they've been saved by a singalong chorus, but here they seem devoid of new ideas: every attempt at an anthem repeats something we've heard before. And when that chorus sounds like it's been written with the sole intention of getting a live audience to sing it back at the band, a desperate sense of self-justification is left hanging in the air.
Alan Morrison
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