Crocodiles debut full length, out on Fat Possum on April 28 opens with forty-eight seconds of fuzzed out organ and ambient electrical hum; the title of that track is “Screaming Chrome.” Most of the time, I’d poke fun at an opening track that only serves as a palette cleanser, calling it a waste of space, an immensely contrived and pompous gesture or both. Here, however, this forty-eight seconds of wandering, gritty chords serve as a perfect introduction to what Crocodiles are doing on the record. So does the track’s title. The eight songs that follow “Screaming Chrome” are deeply influenced by a wide variety of popular American music forms, but profoundly subverted by a post-millennial cynicism and filtered through a layer of obscuring grit and grime. There are times when Crocodiles sound like Bobby Womack playing at the bottom of a well. “Screaming Chrome” speaks to this manipulation of the American dream. This album is a once-gleaming piece of Detroit steel rolling down an empty four lane interstate, it’s formerly bright metallic touches now singed with rust, its robin’s egg blue paint now covered with Bondo, still regal, but stumbling and ramshackle.
The first proper song on Summer of Hate, “I Wanna Kill,” has been floating around the internet for a while. It’s a song that evokes a whole range of things you’ve heard before: vintage Ramones, The Cure, the 60s girl group classic “Then He Kissed Me,” surf rock, The Jesus and Mary Chain and, for about seven seconds, The Monkees. The drums are a clear throwback to 80s British mope rock, the vocals, drenched with distortion, recall a wide range of psychedelic acts, the bouncy keyboards could have been pulled from “Daydream Believer” and the hook might force the band to pay royalties to The Crystals. Out of this bric-a-brac emerges an immensely catchy, but utterly modern track. Kevin and I talked about this song for fifteen minutes, trying to nail down what it reminded us of and only managing to generate the above laundry list of sonic touchstones. Our final conclusion was that this would be an ideal track to run over the credits if anyone ever remakes “Sixteen Candles.” Much of Summer of Hate will cause listeners to rifle through their mental rolodexes, scrambling to put their fingers on what each track sounds like. This rewards repeated listens. The answer that I eventually arrived at was that each song sounds like Crocodiles, which is pretty sweet. From the ether, they’ve managed to cobble together a unique but slightly undefinable sound.
Crocodiles are a duo, Charles Rowell and Brandon Welchez, and they manage to squeeze a lot of sound into the record. From the aforementioned and fairly omnipresent organ sound, to acid-rock, blues-inspired guitar riffs and mechanized drum loops, Summer of Hate is chock full of compelling sonic landscapes. While each song has a mildly different modus operandi (“Here Comes the Sky” works in a spacey, bluesy zone; “Summer of Hate” has insistent drums and hammering chords in front of an “Into the Light”-esque crunched out fuzz, “Soft Skull” is damn-near a dance song, in the same way that “Killing and Arab” was and so forth), they’re all blanketed in fuzz and fronted by a sneering vocal delivery that both pushes listeners away and pulls them closer. Rowell and Welchez are both clearly talented dudes, and the record speaks to their ability to tap a bunch of ideas and force them into new modes.
There are a few moments on Summer of Hate that stand out. “Flash of Light” is an aggressive stomp (“Tonight, I’m gonna set my house on fire.”), that devolves into a minute of atonal white noise at the end. That white noise morphs into the next track, the equally stellar “Sleeping with the Lord.” It’s a cool trick that shows a certain hipsterish disdain for the audience (the white noise is ear-splitting, to a degree), but also gives the record a more unified quality. Song into noise into song implies something about art, I think, which is kind of cool. The album’s closer, “Young Drugs,” a meandering seven minutes of keyboards and distortion, is also top-notch and implies that Crocodiles are probably a solid live act, assuming they stretch these tracks out a bit on stage.
Overall, Summer of Hate is worth your attention. The songs, in general, are equal parts catchy and standoffish, forcing both toe-tapping and head-scratching. It’s an album to listen to with the windows rolled down as you drive through a post-industrial urban wasteland. Good times all around. Enjoy the two tracks below and pre-order post haste.
Pre-order Crocodiles at insound.
