San Diego, CA’s Crocodiles have signed to Frenchkiss Records and will release their third full-length album, Endless Flowers, on June 5th, 2012.

While following in the footsteps of the raw, anthemic psychedelia of 2010′s Sleep Forever and the “repeat-ready… art-punk renaissance” (Rolling Stone) of their 2009 debut Summer of Hate, the songs on Endless Flowers add a refined cohesion and unmistakable sunnyness to Crocodiles’ glorious, noise and echo-cloaked pop. The title track opener is four and a half minutes of soaring, alarm-ringing guitars, while “Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9)” comes next with a resounding, punk-inflected charge. The 7-plus minute “My Surfing Lucifer” begins with two minutes of grimy, hissed spoken word before ascending to glammy, distorted heights; the bass-heavy and buzzing “Dark Alleys” is a motorik march; and the swirling “Bubblegum Trash” has a sweet, dirty charm. Nearly all are single-worthy, and are embellished with singer/guitarist Brandon Welchez’s newly forward-mixed croon.

Crocodiles have evolved from their 2008 genesis as the core duo of Welchez and guitarist Charles Rowell into today’s five-piece, which includes keyboardist Robin Eisenberg, bassist Marco Gonzalez, and drummer Anna Schulte. Last summer, the band headed to Berlin to rehearse and record Endless Flowers, which Welchez and Rowell had written last winter.

Often self-proclaimed, the Original Gangster from Cleveland, Bushwalla represents the eclectic talents of Billy “Bushwalla” Galewood. A native of Cleveland, he started performing musical theater at the early age of 9. For the next 10 years, he crafted his performing skills as a professional clown while on stage with the Cleveland Opera, Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, and the Cleveland Ballet. In 1995, Billy set out to New York City to study theater at the American Musical & Dramatic Academy. While in New York, he supported himself as a street performer incorporating such feats as juggling, magic, chair-balancing, and fire-breathing.

Dirty Projectors was formed in 2003 by David Longstreth, using the moniker to release wildly imaginative albums spanning guitar-based experimental song, scored composition, electronic music, hardcore, and medieval vocal polyphony.

Longstreth has found the beautiful, generous simplicity of the heart and soul. Same as it ever was. And this must be exactly the place where he’s planted the seeds for his band’s finest album to date. Another reinvention in a career defined by reinvention, Swing Lo Magellan does what no Dirty Projectors album has done before: it’s about songs. Few songwriters can pull off the challenge to write as simple and direct as possible, and fewer still can do it and be left with something that feels irreducibly personal and idiosyncratic. Swing Lo Magellan gives us twelve such songs, one after another.

Cross Record

Dangermuffin can no longer be plainly dubbed an Americana or roots-rock band. Behind the virtuosic rhythms of drummer Steven Sandifer, the group seamlessly segues from calypso to world beat to a down-home shuffle, often within the same song. When guitarist Mikie Sivilli steps in with a powerful slide-driven lead, one might even venture to call it Southern rock. But by the time songwriter Dan Lotti sings the first words of another verse with his unmistakable light rasp, the listener is undeniably back on the beach, pondering both the world’s pleasures and ills through sandy toes.

Patterson Hood is best known as the leader of the Drive-By Truckers. He is the son of acclaimed Muscle Shoals bassist David Hood. In 2004, he released an album entitled Killers and Stars. His most recent album, Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, was released in September of 2012. Patterson said, "I could clearly hear in my head exactly how I wanted every song to sound and made a list of who I wanted to play on each pone. It is in some ways the most personal album I've ever made. There has always been a lot of me in all of the albums we've done, but usually semi-disguised as character sketches and stories, but the first person narrative in this one is pretty firmly rooted in autobiography, albeit in two dramaticaly differing time periods."

T. Hardy Morris

As record store clerks in Chapel Hill, NC, Heather McEntire (of post-punk veterans Bellafea) and Jenks Miller (of heavy-psych/metal outfit Horseback) spent their evenings creating Mount Moriah as an outlet for their mutual interest in classic American folk and rock music. Born in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, McEntire weaves narratives into spectral tapestries imbued with the complex majesty of the South and its deep-seated spirituality. With nods to both classic folk-rock and their contemporaries, Mount Moriah challenges existing traditional folk music forms with arrangements born from Miller’s interest in minimalism and sound texture.

Jesse Sykes

As part of the surf revival movement of the early '90s (Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Laika & the Cosmonauts, the re-emergence of the great Dick Dale, etc.), Auburn's Man or Astroman? specializes in a slightly different variation on the genre, self-described as space-age surf. Formed in 1992, the quartet originally consisted of members who went by such off the wall aliases as Birdstuff (drums), Star Crunch (guitar), Dr. Delecto & his Invisible Vaportron (bass), and Electronic Monkey Wizard (on something called alternate-universe bass), Man or Astro-man? combined the classic surf sounds of the '60s along with the quirky humor and approach of such groundbreaking groups as Devo.

Jacuzzi Boys