Croc Sound

Uber-cool drone-rock duo Crocodiles speak to Lisa Wright about the eardrum-rattling aceness of their new album…

we wanted to have a poppy element but make it a bit weird. I’m drawn to the weird sounds!” chuckles Crocodiles’ frontman, Brandon Welchez. With a slew of sold-out, highly acclaimed 7”s (including splits with the likes of Cold Cave, Dum Dum Girls and Pens) under their belts, as well as an American debut (‘Summer Of Hate’), Welchez and bandmate Charles Rowell are now preparing to unleash round two of Crocodiles – ‘Sleep Forever’, an album that takes the distorted garage rumbles of old and fills them out with hazy layering and some very weird sounds indeed. “Philosophically, we don’t really like to preconceive what we want something to sound like. We’re best friends when we get to musical things – if we’re listening to a type of music we’re usually going through it together so maybe that comes through, but we don’t like to have preconceptions about what we want to do,” elaborates the singer. “We just took from December ‘09 through April ‘10 off to write a batch of songs; it feels much more like a whole album this time. There’s more thought put into this one, it feels more cohesive to us.”

Doffing a hat to the Jesus And Mary Chain and Echo And The Bunnymen among others, ‘Sleep Forever’ still clearly displays the pair’s mutual love of the fuzzier end of the spectrum but also expands on the formula of old to produce a far more intricate result; with the likes of ‘Mirrors’’ spiralling introductory drone making a convincing case to be this year’s ‘Sea Within A Sea’ and ‘Girl In Black’’s My Bloody Valentine-esque vocal, the band have clearly learnt (after some slightly unjustified criticisms of unoriginality) how to hone their influences into an altogether more innovative package. “Did we care about the criticism?” says Welchez. “To some degree, but you can’t let that… no, we don’t care. If people like it they like it, if they don’t they don’t. It doesn’t bother us.” The pair have nothing to worry about this time around, however, and, with a newly-expanded touring five-piece band, Crocodiles’ live show seems set to jump up a notch in parallel. “We recorded the album with just the two of us like the first one, but with that there were limitations because it was only us two. With this album we thought we’ll just do it and figure it out later how we’ll play it live. We had to get other musicians cos, well, we’ve only got two arms…” Ten arms fully on board, one rather brilliant album waiting to kick off and a host of tour dates to put it all to use – if Crocodiles were a garage-tinged buzz band before, now’s the time when things get serious.

‘Sleep Forever’ is released on Fat Possum on September 13th.