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The Cribs: And Then There Were Three … Again

The Cribs bid adieu to Johnny Marr and get back to the streamlined punk of their early days, coupled with an evolving pop complexity

“Come On, Be A No-One” (download):

The common reaction to the Cribs’ new album, In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull (Wichita), the follow-up to 2009’s enormously successful Ignore The Ignorant, has generally been to tag it as a return to the vigorous punk tone of the band’s earliest work. Gary Jarman understands the perspective from which that opinion is derived, but he’s quick to sharpen any fuzzy logic surrounding it.

“In some ways, I take it as a compliment; in other ways I find it a bit weird,” says Jarman from his home in Portland, Ore. “We had a year off last year, and we reverted to being a three-piece, so it almost feels like the first record again. So, in some ways, I understand that. But the songs are certainly less simple than the early stuff, and it’s a progression on the last record.”

As Jarman notes, Brazen Bull represents a physical return to the Cribs’ original band-of-Brit-brothers format—Gary on bass/vocals, his twin Ryan on guitar/vocals and younger brother Ross on drums—after the departure of the massively influential Johnny Marr, who added sinewy guitar and a palpable sense of maturation to the band’s already potent sound. Ignore The Ignorant was concrete evidence of the former Smiths/Modest Mouse guitarist’s effect on the Cribs; released the same week as the 13 Beatles reissues, Ignorant immediately shot into the top-10, outselling all but two of the Fab Four albums, a fact that skated across the band’s frontal lobes while making Brazen Bull.

“The third album had our biggest single on it, and the album itself was inside the top-10, so that was on our minds when we made the last record,” says Jarman with a laugh. “It was surreal. It’s a bit difficult to detach yourself from that because you become aware of it, but you don’t want it to become your modus operandi.”

After rigorous touring in support of Ignore The Ignorant, Marr wanted work on a new solo project and the Cribs were ready for a brief vacation before embarking on what would ultimately become In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull. Unfortunately, a few interview miscues created a bit of friction in a situation that had not been particularly contentious, but things between Marr and the Cribs were ultimately smoothed over.

“There was a bit of a press fallout after Johnny left the band, and I think people felt the need to take sides, be it ours or Johnny’s, and that fanned the flames,” says Jarman. “We’ve been as amicable as we could be on this, and it muddied the waters.”

Given the new album’s blend of visceral raw punk energy and full-bodied pop melodicism, Marr’s two-year tenure with the Cribs left an obvious mark on the band’s creative approach.

“We were Smiths fans, and to find out that Johnny was a fan of ours would have been enough,” says Jarman. “He learned from us, and we probably learned the opposite from him. The way we operate was very different from what Johnny had been used to. We’re very hands-on and not afraid of getting our hands dirty. For us, we were so against the idea of crafting a record and using nice gear to get nice sounds.”

At least part of Brazen Bull’s sonic profile can be attributed to Dave Fridmann and Steve Albini, both of whom provided their signature studio expertise to the project. Working with both boardsmen satisfied a longstanding desire for the Jarmans, who had long been enamored of their iconic ’90s work.

“We’d wanted to work with Dave Fridmann for awhile,” says Jarman. “He’s an ideal producer for us. He strikes that balance; he has a great ambient room sound, which was key to capture the live sound of the band, the bedrock of the record, but he’s a real sonic experimenter, and he pushes you to come up with different textures and ideas. Then we did four tracks with Albini, but only one made the record. That was due to feel more than anything else. We did four tracks in three days. It was really quick. His ideology really fits with the way we like to operate. We really liked the Albini sessions, but we decided to hold back the majority of it for another record, which we’re hoping to record this year.”

Some of the album was also recorded at the legendary Abbey Road studio, and the Beatles drift through those Cribs-produced sessions like friendly old ghosts. “This is going to sound pompous, but we did four tracks at Abbey Road,” says Jarman. “We had a bunch of leftover ideas we wanted to weave into one long 15-minute song, but it’s kind of broken into four songs. We self-produced because we knew exactly how we wanted it to be, then Fridmann mixed it.”

Perhaps the most direct connection between Brazen Bull and the Cribs’ early output is the new album’s in-the-moment feel, a result of working quickly and with a distinct lack of afterthought. “It’s definitely recorded as a live band in the room, so I think that’s probably what helps that resonate,” says Jarman. “The third and fourth records were definitely much longer recording affairs. We wanted to get back to the immediacy of three brothers playing in a room together and trying to capture that as best as we could, because I think that’s way we work best.”

Part of Brazen Bull’s slight identity crisis may have resulted from the decision to release the album’s two most stripped-down punk howlers, “Come On, Be A No One” and “Chi-Town,” as the initial singles. And a fraction of Jarman’s sensitivity to the subsequent reaction stems from his sometimes rocky relationship with the British press and its infamous love-you-until-we-don’t attitude.

“The songs are definitely very direct punk-rock/pop songs, but I don’t think they’re totally indicative of the arc of the record,” he says. “With the U.K. press, the first songs they heard were the two songs we put out, and you put your most catchy, immediate stuff out there first. If you’re a top-10 band in the U.K., you’re expected to be pop stars. It’s different in America. In the U.K., it’s magnified. It’s like a pressure cooker.”

The relaxed atmosphere on Brazen Bull is a reflection of the leisurely pace the band took in writing the album, one that was all but unknown on the last couple of Cribs LPs. The process of Brazen Bull seemed diametrically opposed to the Cribs’ previous two albums, where writing was shoehorned in wherever it would fit and recording schedules were protracted and drawn out over several months.

“The fact that we had time off made things very different,” says Jarman. “The last two records were written between touring, and I think we were burned in some ways. With this one, it was total fun, messing about with different gear and playing around with different sounds. We wrote two albums’ worth of stuff; there’s 14 tracks on the record, we wrote about eight b-sides, and there’s still a bunch of songs from sessions we did in Switzerland and a bunch of songs from the sessions we did with Albini that we’re holding back. I think we wrote 24 tracks, and that’s because we had the liberty of time, and we were enjoying hanging out and playing and writing. There was no deadline on when we had to be in the studio. That was the key difference.”

Between the unhurried pace of writing new material, the quick-yet-deliberate recording schedule and the absence of label interference, the Jarmans felt a great deal of freedom in creating Brazen Bull. The one thing that can truly derail any creative endeavor is the specter of internal expectations, which can often loom larger than the external pressure. The Cribs tend not to hang on the cross of critical self-examination.

“As for personal expectations and between me and my brothers, all we want to do is to make a better record than the last one, and that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do,” says Jarman. “Whether it sells more or not doesn’t factor into it. As long as we feel like we’ve done something that’s better than the last one, and we’re prepared to put it out and tour and talk about it and be proud of it, that’s OK. As long as I feel like there’s some validity to it and I care about it, then I can just about get my head around having people look at me and critique me.”

—Brian Baker