The debate about the vitality and relevance of rock ’n’ roll has ended or at least stalled, leaving behind suppositions that the genre itself is now a hipster taste the way jazz was in the 1950s, and that younger rock ’n’ rollers should resign themselves to establishing modest stylistic boutiques.
On their sixth album, For All My Sisters, The Cribs maintain their shop in 1990s alternative rock, a neighborhood not as overrun by gentrification as every post-British Invasion section of the 1960s or, lately, the disco district of the 1970s.
The band’s three Yorkshire natives and brothers—Ryan, Gary and Ross Jarman—evince village-preservation pride and, despite getting Ric Ocasek to oversee the property, show reluctance to prettify the more rundown aspects of the environment.
Ocasek steps around any potential community ire: While the power-pop stomp and wee-woo keyboards of “An Ivory Hand” recall Weezer, one of the notable bands the Cars frontman has worked with, he avoids giving this or any of the other songs here a self-conscious gloss. Rivers Cuomo’s geekiness is just another vintage article for the racks.
The racks also feature youthfully desolate Britpop balladry (“Simple Story”), the Cure’s tuneful and relatively cheerful side (“Diamond Girl”), and the combination of overdriven-guitar dissonance and catchy consonance that so many post-Nirvana bands used to try (“Finally Free”).
Everything is in good and deliberately distressed condition, and The Cribs present each item attractively, although the stock doesn’t seem to have changed much since 2012’s In the Belly of the Brazen Bull, and lead singer Ryan is not an especially compelling salesman.
For All My Sisters isn’t a bad boutique. Perhaps 1990s alternative rock is just too recent, and too many of its practitioners still operating, for effective deconstruction, reconstruction, revivalism or beautification.
