Album Review: Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever by The Cribs

With each album, the Cribs have gotten a little sharper and more focused, and nowhere is this clearer than on the brilliantly named Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever, the band's major-label debut. The Cribs enlisted Franz Ferdinand's Alex Kapranos as producer, and it's a good match: while he doesn't impose too much of Franz's clockwork precision on the band, Kapranos reins in the Cribs' more shambling tendencies just enough to make Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever their most listenable, and diverse, work yet. The album kicks off with a slew of bouncy, angular songs about awkward relationships and killer crushes that sound like state-of-the-art British indie circa the late 2000s -- in particular, "Our Bovine Public"'s ridiculously catchy melody and punchy drums feel like the results of an experiment to fuse together Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Good Shoes in some secret lab.

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