The Cribs – In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull CD PROMO
‘Glitters Like Gold’ opens the record strongly, greeting us with 20 seconds of crashing drums and screeching guitar noise before bursting into pleasing vocal melodies and tuneful guitar. ‘Come On Be A No-One’ is up next: another in-your-face slab of loud and power-packed indie rock, and very much an enjoyable one too. ‘Anna’, track four, is also very good – slightly more house-trained but far from tame, it’s gripping and catchy as hell. Ignoring ‘Jaded Youth’, which edges worryingly close to what one might consider ‘dad-rock’ with its big riffs and lyrics like ‘If I went back to school, would I be cool?’, the first four tracks on ‘In The Belly Of The Brazen Bull’ forecast a very strong album indeed.
And the final four tracks are even better. Essentially one 10-minute epic split into four bite-size chunks; it’s brand new territory for the Jarmans and boy does it pay off. ‘Stalagmites’ is the lengthiest of the bunch, splitting time between militaristic snare roles with distorted spoken word vocals and noisy guitar work accompanied by Cribs-like chants – it’s all-over-the-shop goodness. ‘Like A Gift Giver’, next, is barely a minute in length, but that’s sufficient time for the gentle guitar work and soft vocals to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, while song three (‘Butterflies’) is also excellent. ‘Sorry that it’s taken years / We were victims of our own ideals,’ sing the Jarmans on closer ‘Arena Rock Encore With Full Cast’ – but apologies are not necessary: these four songs alone are well worth a few years in waiting.
It’s somewhere in between these first four and last four that things go a bit weary, however. While ‘I Should Have Helped’ – which sees Ryan taking centre stage with acoustic guitar, singing softly, sincerely and beautifully – is subtle and modest, other mid-album tracks come across a little brash or even, dare I say it, cheesy. ‘Chi-Town’, ‘Confident Men’, ‘Pure-O’ : none of these are bad songs, but they’re far from The Cribs at their finest.
Label: Wichita
Counrty: UK
Media Condition: Near Mint (NM or M-)
Sleeve Condition: Near Mint (NM or M-)