#28 Album Of 2010: Sleep Forever - Crocodiles

Sleep Forever

Crocodiles
Fat Possum Records.

Original SCQ Review

Somehow I didn’t see it at first, that nebulous grave luring children toward the brink. “You created me. Get in,” its darkness beckons, promising secrets one can never understand in the comforts of their parents’ living-room. Kids don’t typically hang out in cemeteries unless they’ve experienced death first-hand, but these kids stand undeterred as if they’ve already lost a precious piece of their youth. Nothing about these children, or the hole they’re digging, suggests that they’re the type to believe that when people die, they’re just sleeping forever.

That naïve mentality lurks around the comatose ambience Crocodiles harness on this sophomore, fleshing out their garage impulsiveness with a pristine echo that shapes these riffs in new, more resonant ways. And it’s almost as easy to miss initially, its cosmic bottomless end no clearer than Sleep Forever’s graveyard plot. The riffs are stellar, Crocodiles’ choruses rouse all kinds of ecstatic, testosterone-based feelings, but it’s the electronic cracks between these rock-slabs that offer its pomp (‘Billy Speed’) and restraint (‘All My Hate and My Hexes Are For You’).

There’s a lot of wonder hidden inside Sleep Forever, and it works best when compounded with Crocodiles’ swaggering defiance against all of those zines that scheduled their destruction. Suitably, Sleep Forever boasts experience beyond Crocodiles’ age.

Crocodiles (SCQ's Year-End Questionnaire Part V)

After a hype-heavy 2009, Crocodiles (Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell) fought forward with the beautifully layered Sleep Forever and proved they could endure all of the blogger-backlash. At the close of another busy year, Welchez and Rowell still sound invigorated, listing off their favourite LPs of 2010 and looking forward to whatever comes next.

SCQ: Every list-lover's favourite question: what are your top albums of 2010? Feel free to include any older yet worthy records you discovered this year.

BW: I buy records with a near religious fervor, denying myself food and oftentimes finding myself behind in my bills. At the moment, all of my records are packed up in storage while I gradually move to San Francisco. To properly answer this question, I'd really need to flip through them to remember what all I got this year. Just off the top of my head (which I guess means they are most memorable to me) here is a list, in no order, of some of my favorite records this year:

Procedure Club - "Doomed Forever" LP
Dum Dum Girls - "I Will Be" LP
No Age - "Everything Inbetween" LP
Deerhunter - "Halcyon Digest" LP
Morrissey - "Bona Drag" (reissue) LP
Veronica Falls - "Beachy Head" 7"
Heavy Hawaii - "HH" EP
Tamaryn - "The Waves" LP
V/A - " Dancehall 2: The Rise Of Jamaican Dancehall Culture" LP
Neu! - Neu! 86 - LP
That's all I can think of for now...

CR: Heavy Hawaii - HH, Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be, Flight - Lead Riders, Woven Bones - Inbetween And Out, & Paul Weller - Wake Up The Nation

SCQ: What were you listening to a lot of while recording the impressive Sleep Forever?

BW: Tons of Monks, Scientist, Prince Jammy, Stereolab, ? And the Mysterians, Sex Pistols. We brought a portable turntable to the studio and a box of LPs. Those are the ones I remember listening to.

CR: Harmonia, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, King Tubby, The Seeds, Suicide.

SCQ: Be cocky for once in your life: what was the finest thing you did all year? That moment where you actually thought "shit, I nailed that..."?

BW: We played more high pressure shows this year than we ever have in our lives. We are in a weird mid-period as a band where we are still making new fans who have high expectations of us as a live band. We have also been around long enough to have made our nay-sayers even louder in their distaste for us and they continue to root for our failure. That being said, Primavera Festival in Spain was an opprotunity to play for both crowds and an even bigger amount of people who probably had no idea who we were. I was really nervous before we played, which is unusual for me. I got a grip though and I think we did a really good job for such a high pressure show. We were able to have fun and relax onstage and I thought we pulled off a good show.

CR: I really like the guitar solo on Hollow Hollow Eyes. I was blind drunk when I did it. I feel like they had to prop me up against the amp to record it.

SCQ: Effect and Cause: Before heading out for the weekend, I ensure my iPod is stacked with potential first-listens for the eventual bus-ride home. Nevertheless, every drunken journey throughout the month of October found me selecting 'Mirrors' and letting the whole disc flow from there. Okay, your turn: confess a true tale that inspired one of the songs on Sleep Forever.

BW: "Hollow Hollow Eyes" was written after visiting an out of town friend who had turned into a heroin addict since the last time I had seen him. We've seen friends go down that path before and it never ends happily, unfortunately.

CR: The song Billy Speed is a memorial to our best friend who passed away and originally the song was created on top of a Rufus Thomas (of Walking The Dog fame) sample, hip-hop style.

SCQ: If all the reasonable and implausible ideas in your head came to fruition in 2011, what would they be?

BW: We want to make a much better 3rd album than anything we've done before - we want to surprise ourselves. And hopefully see some places we haven't seen before - I'm looking at you, Japan and Latin America.

CR: Another album to be proud of.

Sleep Forever - Crocodiles

Sleep Forever

Crocodiles
Fat Possum Records.

SCQ Rating: 80%

If rock and roll got its start as the heartbeat of youth and aggression, psych-rock’s origin stemmed from marijuana roaches and comfy couches. A different sort of rebellion, then; one that welcomed grooves and tempos that Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry used, not for the purpose of dancing or flaunting their conservative parents, but as a means to surrender their understandings of a genre that had hardly woken up and become self-aware. As a child of the 80s who missed the mainstream peaks of both genres, I hear psych-rock as rock and roll surviving its adolescence and realizing an enormous world of influences and possibilities. Incorporate some eastern raga influences into your guitar-work, grab some dewy mysticism in the form of blown-out reverb, or maybe just act out by playing tapes backwards and singing far-out lyrics. My generation laughed at typecast hippies talking about mind-expansion but that’s because many of us grew up in a time of corporate radio. The tenets of psychedelic rock are all too real.

September saw the release of two prominent psych-rock outfits, Crocodiles and The Black Angels, harnessing similar strains of psych-rock into very separate end results. And although I initially envisioned penning a psych-rock duel contrasting the two, I’ve since resigned myself not to delve into the latter band’s work. Not to say Phosphene Dream isn’t without its merits; actually, The Black Angels hone a very faithful delineation of psych-rock’s roots, from Alex Maas’ vocal-take on Jim Morrison to the rhythm-section’s early-70s swagger. Yet occasionally punching your guitars out of the mix as the 90s saw fit doesn’t equal the progressive scope that a band like Crocodiles are taking on their spellbinding Sleep Forever.

Inaudible strands of heady loops unfurl from speakers into a chugging roar of distortion that sets the groundwork for ‘Mirrors’. And although that roar may not sound so far-removed from the guitar squalls conducted by The Black Angels or their colleagues, it’s just steadying the foundation for Sleep Forever’s coming permutations. Guitar-fuzz merges to haunted-house organs on the raucous ‘Hollow Hollow Eyes’ yet that fuzz develops an anemic sheen over ‘Girl In Black’ and ‘All My Hate and My Hexes Are For You’, as if their testosterone has been drained in favour of quieter reflections. Such meditative songwriting still presents a watershed moment for the band some publications considered a weak link in 2009’s lo-fi explosion, and Sleep Forever’s eight tracks show that Crocodiles aren’t content to simply rehash psych-rock’s greatest trademarks. Split between distorted aggression and hypnotic soundscapes, this record all but refutes the notion that Crocodiles have any contemporaries at present. Far-out, indeed.


Crocodiles - Mirrors by walleum