They play in a almost total darkness, having installed just 2 red lights on the floor, and they start not caring about the rest, certainly not caring about the public, launching their dark, loudly distorted guitar riffs, drum beats and spaced out sound inside the small LA club the Echo.
Crocodiles, a five piece band formed by a San Diego duo, Charles Rowell (guitar) and Brandon Welchez (vocals/guitars) after playing in different bands (‘The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower’ among others), have released a debut album ‘Summer of Hate’ in April 2009 on Fat Possum Records. To clarify things up, Welchez (who is married to Kristin from Dum Dum Girls) said in an interview it has nothing to do with the hippies’ summer of love.
Pitchfork totally trashed their album saying some songs were ‘photocopied’ from ‘The Jesus and Mary Chain’s, and if I definitively can detect more than a light influence, Pitchfork is wrong on many points, their performance of Monday night translated more than this single influence as their songs revealed catchy pop hooks buried in fuzzed guitars, and above everything, they were damn loud, raw and noisy! So they truly deserve their noise-pop act name contrary to what Pitchfork said.
Also, when bands announce their color right away – it’s obvious they chose their band name Crocodiles because of the Echo and the Bunnymen’s album – it is not fair to reproach them to sound somewhat like them.
Although they started performing only by themselves, on Monday, the San Diego duo was backed up by drummer Alianna Kalaba, bassist Marco Gonzalez and keyboardist Robin Eisenberg.
Their music, like their attitude, seems so tough, almost vicious, and on the edge, just like Brandon Welchez’s walk on the edge of the stage in semi-darkness and finally falling in the audience. They kill their guitars, even jump on them occasionally, they make them infinitely reverb and distortedly scream strident sounds, without stopping Welchez’s aggressive dance number with his microphone.
‘Neon Jesus’ is a pulsing hypnotic rock part, ‘Sleep forever’ is more shoegazing, and ‘Summer of Hate’ more druggy and psychedelic, but listening to these songs on their myspace gives a poor idea of their muscular, raging and crude live performance. There is so much more dissonance, and more noise extraction from the guitars.
The problem was with the vocals that were so completely buried in the loud guitars, keyboard and drums, I couldn’t hear a thing most of the time. But reading some of their lyrics, ‘All the kids sing along with me/I, I want to kill tonight/I want to kill tonight’ in “I wanna kill’ or ‘I’m a stranger in the holy land/But I keep my strangeness close at hand’ in ‘Neon Jesus’ gives a pretty good idea of their universe, not exactly what you call positive lyrics, more an expression of rage and frustration.
So the game of comparing bands to others, and The Jesus and Mary Chain tag put on the band appears a little bit too easy to define them, and their strong live show is definitely worth the noisy experience.