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Crocodiles favour sonics over songwriting

“I Wanna Kill,” the first single off Crocodiles‘ Summer of Hate, is a perfect pop song. Sonically, it recalls the Jesus and Mary Chain, with fuzzed out guitars, reverb-soaked vocals and a jackhammer beat. But the tune itself practically floats, especially the jubilant singalong chorus, which repeats the lyric “I want to kill tonight.” It’s probably the most buoyant song ever written about homicide and, placed at track two (track one, “Screaming Chrome,” is a brief ambient intro), it gets the record off to a blazing start.

It’s initially disappointing that the rest of Summer of Hate, Crocodiles’ first full-length, sounds nothing like “I Wanna Kill.” Unlike the single, the rest of the album favours drones over concise pop songs; Crocodiles come about their hooks by way of repetition, not melody, mixing shoegaze guitars with warm synths and hypnotic electro beats. “Here Comes the Sky” is one of the standouts of the collection, despite not really going anywhere in its four-minute runtime; the plunking piano and tremelo-laden arpeggios sound more like a soothing interlude than a radio-ready single.

When the group does pick up the pace, the hooks are typically buried by the hazy production. “Refuse Angels” is short and punchy, but the vocals are so drenched in reverb that it’s practically an instrumental. But with Crocodiles, that’s part of the experience, since Summer of Hate is more about the sonics than the songwriting. This is best exemplified by the title track, its cavernous guitar fuzz the perfect accompaniment to the creep-out vocal melody. It may not be the tight collection of pop songs that the lead single suggests, but the dreamy atmospherics are just as compelling.

Summer of Hate is out now via Fat Possum.