Watching My Bloody Valentine stage their triumphant return to live performance in Dublin last November, it was surreal to recall that the term “shoegaze” began as a sneery put-down from the British music press. The band and their peers dismissed the tag, as musicians invariably do, and insisted their work spoke for itself.
Yet, over time, an insult has become a badge of honour. “Shoegaze” is today a byword for dreamy indie chic, to the point where even second-tier shoegazers such as Chapterhouse are coming out of retirement.
Will the same redemption happen to “landfill indie”? In the early 2000s, rock music had a sudden resurgence, bubbling up from New York (The Strokes, Interpol) and London (The Libertines, Razorlight). At the time, the term “landfill” was intended as an insult. It implied that many of these groups sounded the same – that the success of a talented few had led to a glut of disposable guitar-shredders.
Good or bad, original or derivative, these bands have not gone away. The Libertines re-formed a few years ago, and Interpol and Razorlight continue to tour, despite having done little interesting for many years.
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But landfill indie has never quite been rehabilitated, and it is unthinkable that anyone would willingly embrace the tag. Nobody today celebrates that chapter of music in the way that Britpop is lionised, even though Britpop produced just as many awful artists. (It’s thanks to Britpop that we’re probably going to have to live through a solid decade of cash-grab Oasis-style reunions.)
All of this is unfortunate for the few survivors of the era who remain irrevocably synonymous with landfill indie yet produce worthwhile music. The most obvious example is The Cribs, who return with their fantastic ninth album, Selling a Vibe.
As before, the trio of Yorkshire siblings sound like a bittersweet English updating of sludgy American indie strivers from the 1980s or 1990s: they are audibly operating in the jet stream of The Replacements and Guided By Voices. Yet they are seemingly doomed to see out their days being spoken of in the same breath as The Pigeon Detectives and The Futureheads.
Selling a Vibe, on which they worked with the pop producer Patrick Wimberly (Paloma Faith, Ellie Goulding), is a reminder that they remain first-rank indie underdogs. There’s nothing original about their sound – their guitars shimmer much as they always have done, while the twins Ryan and Gary Jarman deliver their vocals in a touchingly plaintive style that makes you wonder if they could do with popping out for a quick cry.
If you don’t like this sort of thing, it will be like Pete Doherty’s nails scraping over a chalkboard sign worn by Ricky Wilson of Kaiser Chiefs. But for fans of vulnerable, emotionally wide-open indie, the album’s opener, Dark Luck, is a brilliant mash-up of angst and dreamy yearning. That same feeling is threaded through A Point Too Hard to Make, which suggests a normcore Sonic Youth. Summer Seizures is pristine outsider pop: think The Feelies meets The Clean.
Having briefly counted Johnny Marr of The Smiths as a bandmate – he played with The Cribs for three years – the Jarmans will know all about the heartbreaking beauty of a jangling anthem. They show they’ve learned that lesson well on the album’s closing track, Brothers Won’t Break, a shimmering full stop that gives off a majestically raw ache.
Yes, it’s indie-schmindie with a vengeance, and it makes Belle and Sebastian sound like Slipknot. But the Jarmans – the twins are joined by their younger brother Ross on drums – are masters of what they do, and this is an excellent LP from a trio that merit more than to be a footnote in the stories of Scouting for Girls or The Fratellis. If ever a landfill-indie band deserved a shoegaze-style rehabilitation, it’s The Cribs.
