Review: Christian Stanger

Standing on the barrier all night, my shirt soaked through with Guinness, a barely half-filled room at The Zoo stretching out behind me, I’d just lost sight of one of my mates. It turns out he was about to make a poor decision. I look around and back to the stage just in time to see him vault the barrier, scale the stage onto the wooden boards, and indulge in a few seconds of awkward, drunk and altogether glorious air guitar before getting manhandled by security and escorted down to the Ann Street curb.

That and 20 belted anthems shredding my cords is the enduring, hazy and sweaty memory of the first time I saw The Cribs in January 2013. I’d fallen in love with the Wakefield lads years earlier, and this chaotic night locked it into my own personal zeitgeist forever. I’ve seen the band a few times since, usually in similarly cramped venues, but nothing has quite captured the chaotic joy of seeing them for the first time

It’s an eclectic crowd tonight, spanning forty-something fans who have been following The Cribs for decades and people young enough to have missed The New Fellas the first time around. There’s a sense of anticipation despite the midweek setting, with the room ready to sing every word of ‘Hey Scenesters!’.

Stepping up to kick things off on a Tuesday night carries a fair weight of pressure. You’re up there needing to transform a low-key, probably non-inebriated, Tuesday night crowd into something the next band and headliners can simply tip over. It’s a tall order, but it’s one that locals STAHR are more than prepared for, with a wall of desert rock sound, polished melodies and darkly atmospheric textures dissolving any working-week lethargy in the venue.

Starting with ‘Mother Aura’, the guitars overlap in a haze of reverb, frontwoman Grace Harris moves with a deliberate, sensual swagger, immediately commanding attention as she sings lyrics about stepping out into the city. ‘Loving Friend’ follows, synth heavy and ethereal, leaning further into the desert rock sound as the keys lay down the foundation and everything builds over the top. Harris and guitarist/vocalist Sam Shepherd bounce off one another and you’re never too far away from a shredding guitar solo. STAHR are the polished antidote to The Cribs’ brash, rough-around-the-edges mode of operation.

I may be short on company on this one, but I do love a keytar. I love the novelty, the shape, the slight awkwardness of wielding what is essentially a teched-out piano around your neck. So, Lucid Safari are right up my alley.

New addition Issy Morrison completes the band, bringing both the keytar and an almost second-front-person energy to the stage. She is fully bought-in to the mission, to the point that you can barely imagine the band on stage without her out front, rocking the massive keytar. ‘Running’ kicks off the set, but ‘Miss You’, released just last week, is where the crowd properly wakes up, with Morrison and singer-songwriter Daniel J. Lewis sharing vocals. It’s one of the best local releases I’ve heard all year with lush, dreamlike synth layers colliding with calculated drum shifts and staccato guitar bites. A perfect pop track.

The Jarman brothers arrive on stage with the customary uniform, paper-thin shirts and leather jackets one or two sizes too small. Ross is the more sensible of the three, but being the drummer, he needs the flexibility. There is no messing about and we’re into ‘Dark Luck’, the Selling A Vibe opener. Then it’s ‘Men’s Needs’ setting the tone for an evening built around big songs and bigger singalongs, and the crowd responds in kind. Ryan’s comically small leather jacket is discarded in time for ‘Hey Scenesters’, at which point I realise that this not-quite-full room isn’t just singing along, they’re singing the riffs.

Nobody plays guitar like Ryan Jarman, and nobody writes a catchier riff while doing it. I’ve spent more than 15 years listening to these songs, but there is something different about hearing an entire room instinctively sing along to the guitar. And, for a band who have occasionally been gloriously loose live, this is a tight show, and Ryan and Gary are in fine form, their stop-start harmonies and screams landing squarely in key.

We’re about a third of the way through a sprawling set, already covering nearly all nine (9!!) albums when Gary throws it out to the crowd for requests. His regret is immediate. The selection that cuts through is ‘Ancient History’, a deepish cut from 2007’s crowning achievement, Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever and a track that hasn’t been played live in forever. Suddenly it’s all hands on deck as the brothers try to piece it together, each managing to retrieve different fragments of the song while nothing quite coheres. Ryan eventually concedes: “It’s nothing we can just pull out of the bag.” The room erupts.

It’s a beautifully punk rock moment. An unplanned moment, just a hasty decision to have a crack at a song they haven’t played in years and discovering that they absolutely have no idea how it goes. They laugh, the crowd laughs, we move to more bangers that make the walls shake. Moments like this are what the best gigs are made of.

The set leans heavily on Selling A Vibe and Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever, as you’d expect, but there’s enough jumping around the catalogue to keep it from becoming a greatest hits, nostalgia exercise. ‘We Share The Same Skies’ is an obvious highlight from Ignore The Ignorant, while ‘Back To The Bolthole’ and ‘Come On, Be A No-One’ break up the run of melody-focused indie rock with bursts of all-out noise. ‘Shoot The Poets’ does the opposite. Ryan delicately strums his rented acoustic as the crowd nods along, a rare moment of stillness before the volume inevitably comes back up.

‘Be Safe’ is probably the best song by The Cribs. Maybe the best song ever. Everyone has a favourite line. Mine? “The light within me shines like a diamond mine, like an unarmed walrus, like a dead man face down on a highway” – Wow. The impassioned noise rock is elevated as it meets Lee Ranaldo’s slam poetry and then again towards the end as the screams of “Be safe, be safe, be safe” become increasingly earnest and desperate. It’s emotionally draining.

And then, because apparently 13 years isn’t enough time for certain things to change, the same bloke who scrambled onto the stage at The Zoo in 2013 is beside me, singing at the top of his lungs: “Ten years on and 2001 is long gone.” Ryan obliges, launching into the first verse of the ‘Leather Jacket Love Song’. The show closes in a sea of strobes and squalling feedback with ‘Pink Snow’. What did you expect? Another formative track from another formative era of my life, and perhaps the only way this particular night could have ended.

 – GALLERY –