It would appear that ‘New Fellas’ is The Cribs second album, they’re not all as new then as they suggest. Meaning that the first record must have passed us by somewhat. Though from the brief mp3 snippets of on their official site we’ll label it, possibly unfairly, the sound of early-ish Idlewild covering The Libertines, averagely. For us though, and we’d imagine many more, it all started with the persistent rabble-rousing single ‘Hey Scensters!’, the sound of Art Brut reaching the end of their tether, or The Fall eating The Strokes under strobes with an orange Tango chaser. And this is what opens this second album, sensibly and fittingly.
That song tells you everything you really need to know about this album – it’s impatient and ergo quite urgent, you certainly don’t need a PhD to get your head around these melodies, but they still play like they invented the concept, and it has a sense of humour about and/or a hungry disregard for anything and everything in eyeshot.
And that is all quite correct, but it also stretches much further. This is an album of some quite unexpected breadth, it has legs. On the brilliantly titled ‘Hello? Oh…’ they sound like The Lemonheads waltzing with The Coral, on ‘Mirror Kisses’ they steal the punch-the-air “whoooh-oh” from ‘Kids In America and throw it into the blender with Idlewild’s ‘Film For The Future’ and a double-weight of sugar, and ‘Things Are Going To Change’ sounds like The Delgados drinking with Cheap Trick. That they sound like a pub of real ale drinkers in many of the mass sing-along choruses, especially the fantastic11pm anthem ‘The Wrong Way To Be’, only makes it more memorable. Positively teetering on the brink of four stars.