REVIEW: Crocodiles - Sleep Forever

Crocodiles - Sleep Forever
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Crocodiles have graduated from the garage to the stadium. On last year’s Summer of Hate, the band relied on drum machines and sounded as though they were making songs in the confined space of a small two-car garage. Sleep Forever features a sound that aims high in an attempt to conquer the sky. Whereas Summer of Hate was more noise pop-meets-garage rock, Sleep Forever is sprawling as it embraces the power of psychedelic rock over a foundation of post-punk revival, Britpop, and Madchester. It’s an album that’s more nuanced than its predecessor, demonstrating that the duo has a firm grasp on the strength of their songwriting. The sound here is much more vast and expansive, no doubt a result of James Ford’s production and the inclusion of a full backing band during the recording process.

With a fitting amount of echo and reverb, it sounds as though frontman Brandon Welchez sings from a pulpit in the sky. If a band aims to be expansive and ambitious with its sound, the music better have lyrics of obvious substance capable of conveying a sense of intellectual depth – only then can they ever achieve such great heights. Sprawling music that sounds as massive as the sky is nothing but a hollow shell if the lyrics are trite and entirely uninspired; the music simply falls flat. On Sleep Forever, Welchez proves to be a capable wordsmith, providing enough lyrical weight to fill the space carved out by guitarist Charles Rowell’s mammoth wall of sound – filled with equal parts discordant noise and gritty electric guitar buoyed by lush reverb.

Welchez’s lyrics help the music on Sleep Forever to be all the more successful. The album is leveled with a haze of echo and reverb, creating a dreamlike feel in many ways. Sleep Forever, for all intents and purposes, is a hard dose of reality: life is full of problems, but you can’t hide in dreams to escape. On “Mirrors,” pain is beautiful when Welchez sings, “Something in the way you crucify me/It makes me smile.” Death is a prevalent theme, but Welchez makes it sound like something of great magnificence, singing, “When you die, you don’t really die/You just paint yourself across the sky” (“Billy Speed”) and “The whole world is an ocean, here to suck you down/The whole world is an ocean, laughing while you drown” (“Stoned To Death”). If anything, Sleep Forever is a celebration of the dark in life, proclaiming it to be what’s truly beautiful in life; it’s what helps remind us that we’re all mortal.

On Sleep Forever, Crocodiles have taken the disenchanted drone of The Jesus and Mary Chain and mixed it with the optimistic expanse of Spiritualized, creating a hypnotic contrast that’s both engaging and, in a way, spiritually transcendent. There’s the Doors-style organ romp of “Stoned To Death,” the eerie, mesmerizing choruses of “Hollow Hollow Eyes,” the Britpop-meets-shoegaze glory of the title track, and the moving closing track “All My Hate and My Hexes Are For You,” the gentle, twisted love letter confessional. Many of the fuzzed-out bass lines sound familiar, but only to the point of creating the notion that Welchez and Rowell know what they’re doing; torchbearers for psych and post-punk revival.

The drawback of the album is its length. Eight songs in 35 minutes fly by, making the album seem rather short. It lifts you up into the atmosphere, but then leaves you there – almost in a sort of purgatory. It seems rather fitting with themes of disenchantment and social malaise, but winds up leaving you wanting more. Sleep Forever, then, sounds more like a stepping stone towards something truly grand; the first half of something classic in its own right.

Sleep Forever is a revelation of the beauty in imperfection, with its successful fusion of lyrical themes and musical moods. Sonically it’s gorgeous and lyrically it’s depressingly charming. Through contrasting the uplifting spirit of the music against dark lyrical content, Crocodiles have created an album that’s intriguing as much for its pop sensibilities as it is for its honest portrayal of the underbelly of life. It’s an album that packs a triumphant sound and a dark beauty.

BUY: Sleep Forever is out today through Fat Possum. Pick it up here.