The Cribs' Selling a Vibe praised for punchy blend of experience and lost innocence

The Cribs’ ninth album, Selling a Vibe, is praised in a Guardian review for striking a punchy balance between songs of lost innocence and bitter experience. The review recalls a BBC podcast last summer, The Rise and Fall of Indie Sleaze, whose third episode heavily featured bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman and centred on the band’s 2005 single Hey Scenesters!.

It notes the Cribs were part of the mid-00s moment while remaining slightly apart from that scene, winning endorsements from figures such as Edwyn Collins, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Johnny Marr and producer Steve Albini. On Selling a Vibe the lyrics regard the band’s past with a rueful eye, the review says: the spectre of a legal battle with their former label haunts the title track and You’ll Tell Me Anything (the band regained the rights to their first five albums), while Summer Seizures and Looking for the Wrong Guy address loss of innocence — “The good times never last” and “ain’t it a shame tomorrow finally came?” The album, produced by Patrick Wimberly, is described as streamlined but not a radical departure from Night Network, with an 80s sheen on A Point Too Hard to Make and a drum machine pulse on Rose Mist.

Reviewing the record as a whole, the Guardian piece says the songs are uniformly well written and powerful, and that Selling a Vibe ends with Brothers Won’t Break, a meditation on fraternal bonds that the review suggests reads like a hymn to the band’s durability.

Key Topics

Culture, The Cribs, Selling A Vibe, Gary Jarman, Patrick Wimberly, Hey Scenesters