As a kid, up until maybe 1986 when R.E.M.’s Life’s Rich Pageant came out, I was what we’d call today a classic rock guy. I listened to WPLJ, WNEW, and WAPP while they were all “album-oriented rock” stations. Today, I tell myself that I was always a little bit left-of-center even for someone who liked classic rock. My preferences tended more toward The Who and The Kinks than, say, Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones. I eventually moved on to The Police, Elvis Costello, and The Clash before getting fully into "alternative" music and the then wonderful WHTG. At any rate, I never spent much time listening to The Cure or The Jesus and Mary Chain until I was older.
Maybe it’s because I feel like I missed out a bit as a teenager, but I’ve been eating up the revival of shoegaze, a genre that grew out of the sound of The Cure, The Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine. In just the last two or three years, bands like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Yuck, and DIIV have carried the torch for 80’s and early-90’s fuzz. Sand Diego’s Crocodiles are the latest neo-shoegaze band to pop onto my radar.
Though I’ve resolved lately to back off on the running in favor of cycling, in the name of cross-training and maintaining this feature, I took to the pavement on foot today with Crocodiles’ latest, Endless Flowers.
Endless Flowers is the third album from Crocodiles. The title track, which opens the album, justifies many of the Jesus and Mary Chain comparisons that feature in almost every review I’ve seen of the record. Rather than imitating The Jesus and Mary Chain, though, I think Crocodiles are just exploring some of the same territory as their predecessors. Songs like “No Black Clouds for Dee Dee” (a song singer/guitarist Brandon Welchez composed for his wife, Dee Dee of Dum Dum Girls), “Electric Death Song” and “Bubblegum Trash” have the post-punk sound, but also have roots in 1960’s pop like Tommy James and the Shondells or The Hollies. The album also contains some straightforward garage rock like “My Surfing Lucifer,” “Welcome Trouble,” and, on the Amazon version anyway, “I’m Not a Young Man Anymore.”
In other words, much of Endless Flowers comes close to post-punk shoegaze pop, while the rest of it sounds like pre-punk, noisy rock and roll. That may sound like Crocodiles have put out a record that doesn’t really know what it wants to be. I think, though, it makes for an interesting entry in this revivalist genre, showcasing what Crocodiles can do with the same influences that inspired many of the bands that came before them.
Endless Flowers is a slightly uneven, but enjoyable blast of fuzz that can satisfy your mid-80's cravings, while it plays with some of the enduring, even “classic,” music that's been around much longer.
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