this one's about The Cribs' new album but also about feeling lost (and found)
I have not always loved The Cribs, actually, as many Cribs fans will profess about themselves (and mean, to be fair to them). I used to not get it at all; their arrival into my life along with the 2007 indie wave that was already growing boring by 2008 (truly, truly fuck The Courteeners), their bad-but-in-tune singing, their high-saturation lo-fi visuals. I liked it but it just didn’t click for me, I thought they were alright. Then I saw them live for the first time, a million years ago now - another lifetime ago now - and I don’t remember where it was or who I was with and they were wearing fucking stupid amazing bondage trousers like the ones from that Mighty Boosh episode that The Rev is in, and they were ragging on their guitars and they really meant it all you know. They meant all the ridiculousness, and all the pain and all the noise. I was a hundred thousand % on board from there on in, devouring everything they’ve written and played and performed, moshing at shows like a teenager (tbf at some of those shows I actually was a teenager. Not so much now but I think it’s still important to do carefree honest moshing sometimes. Losing yourself in a crowd is a cliché for a reason, u know). My friend Ellis has loved The Cribs since always, and he tried to convince me to like them always, and I finally did (worth noting here that Ellis tried to make me watch Twin Peaks, even donating me S1 on DVD, for five whole years before I did and now - obviously - Twin Peaks is my favourite ever show), and they finally meant the world to me. The mere memory of a Cribs gig is now enough to reduce me to tears - especially now tbh - and that’s rly saying something as it’s probably the place in my life I’ve been most covered in other people’s piss.
Their new album, Night Network, came out out at the end of last month and I feel like maybe all I need to say about it is that there is a song called Screaming In Suburbia three tracks in that even just the title of is that precise blend of ridiculous and pained and hyperbolic and earnest that is precisely what I love so much about The Cribs, and also about, perhaps, existing. Cause that’s just it isn’t it, really, that existing is real and raw but also silly and over-exaggerated and it’s kind of futile but also totally utterly heart-shatteringly meaningful. Not existence, not just the idea of being there, but actually existing - actively being alive. It’s absurd, really. It’s enough to make you want to scream into the void - and what is the void to u? Is it suburbia or is it somewhere further? Or closer? Are there bands that make you lose ur mind like this with every song, every breath? I feel like I’m fucking alive, I’m existing, when I listen to The Cribs. I feel like my heart is breaking and mending all at once. Have you seen La La Land? The 20 minute sequence at the end that devastates and elates you, the audience? How every existence has an equal and opposite, and how no existence is the perfect one, and how you don’t even know which would be right if you could even choose? Have you seen Twin Peaks? At the end, when she screams? Into suburbia?? The first time I watched that I started sobbing straight away, with the first note of the scream. I was in my old flat, above a pub in Kentish Town, sat on my single bed which filled the whole width of the room and was squashed up against the window, scratty laptop open and streaming the credits, listening to the theme song I’d already heard a minimum of 96 times, cross-legged and crying. What’s she screaming for? Is she screaming for the same reasons I’m crying? Why am I crying? How does that guitar sound so heartbroken? How will I make it through the next chorus if it gets any more intense than this?
I regularly credit The Cribs with writing what I consider (correctly) to be the most romantic lyric of all time, contested only by Last Shadow Puppets’ “kiss me properly and pull me apart”. The Cribs’, which has reduced me to tears alone on the bus an uncountable (and uncomfortable) amount of times, is:
“no one will do / no one will ever do for you”
It’s the saddest and most beautiful and kindest and most loving and most painful thing I’ve ever heard. It’s totally meaningless if you try and dissect it, and if you don’t then it’s like a razor blade to the heart. It means everything, and it means nothing. Ellis (who convinced me to like The Cribs, u remember) would know the philosopher who theorised that feeling, and would have the knowledge to expand on it. All I have is the knowledge that capturing that feeling as it sits on the knife edge is love and it is pain. I was talking about another Cribs song recently, off of Men’s Needs - perhaps it was even the song Women’s Needs, I can’t remember exactly because my heart was jumping out my skin, u see - to Toby, lamenting how the guitar sounds so violent and yet not abrasive, and how can that be possible, how could they do that with a tone or a note or a pitch and how can it move me the way it does? Surely just a guitar effect couldn’t make me feel like this? And he said that they probably record the guitar really abrasive and then round off the edges (something about taking off the highs and lows, I don’t have the technical knowledge again unfortunately. All about the feelings, me) so that they’re left with the violence of the guitar but without the rough edges; so with every note they capture the middle of a scratch. Are you fucking kidding me?! OF COURSE the middle of a scratch could make me feel like this!!!! Have you ever heard a more perfect metaphor? It’s fucking poetry! And it’s real, they actually captured it, and you can actually hear it and it can actually make you scream. It’s exactly how The Cribs and how existing feel to me - like the middle of a scratch. Exposed and open and painful and tender and ready to pull myself back together and be restored, and hear the highs and lows again. It’s cheesy, but it’s true (and the most romantic lyric of all time is from I’m A Realist. 2007 indie rock taught me love, IDST). <3