CROCODILES – SUMMER OF HATE
When you are a school kid you get to scrawl the names of your favorite bands on your school bag, book covers, and any other available surface as a way of expressing your appreciation of and devotion to your musical heroes (whether they be fleeting or long-lived in your heart). Debut albums can be much like school bags. Influences bared brazenly for all to see. This is not a bad thing, rock’n’roll’s existence has always relied upon this sort of fornication to re-generate itself. 100 people were at the first Sex Pistols gig, yet thousands credit it as the reason they formed a band. The Velvet Underground’s debut album – everyone who bought it allegedly formed a band. The Crocodiles’ Summer of Hate is brazen with the best of them. Their name appropriated from Echo & the Bunnymen’s own debut album, their sound owing much to Jesus & the Mary Chain, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, who all in turn owe huge chunks of debt to the VU – what goes around… But the Crocodiles can hold their head high; their barren, distorted, reverb-laden guitars and vocal sound (as if emanating from of a small hole in a stark, white-walled concrete asylum room) rushes to fill the void, with enough pop hooks (I Want To Kill) to put smiles on the faces of old J&MC and mesmeric epics (Young Drugs) that show they listened well in Neo-Psychedelia 101.
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