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About a year ago, a lot of music industry insiders discovered something that San Francisco music fans had known for a while--that Creeper Lagoon was one of the most exciting new rock bands in America. The quartet released an EP filled with elliptical, hook-filled songs and established itself as one of the Bay Area's hottest live acts, and the labels came sniffing. The foursome signed to Nickelbag, the imprint run by the super-hip Dust Brothers, and recorded its debut in Los Angeles. Expectations are high for the album, I Become Small and Go, but guitarist and co-lead vocalist Sharky Laguana says he and his three bandmates don't sense much pressure. "I don't feel like the next big thing at all," he says on the phone from his San Francisco apartment. But I Become Small is something of a litmus test for rock. Every music fan with a functioning mouth complains about the lack of originality and excitement in the rock world these days, except for those who've lulled themselves into a trance while bobbing their head to Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy." Creeper Lagoon, headed by Laguana and longtime friend and fellow guitarist-vocalist Ian Sefchick, offers a tasteful alternative to its Bay Area neighbor and radio mainstay Third Eye Blind, and the quartet's full-length debut is, at times, masterful. Sefchick, a lanky guy with orb-like eyes, sings in a perpetually drunk-sounding baritone throughout the album, and he writes deceivingly off-kilter songs, such as the utterly romantic, radio-friendly tune "Wonderful Love" and the sparkling, anthemic "Dead Deadly." Laguana, who spends his leisure time trolling thrift stores for obscure records to sample, writes loopier material that could almost qualify as trip-hop, such as "Sylvia" and the hilariously macabre "Drink and Drive." The two songwriters, who met as teen-agers in Cincinnati and moved to San Francisco separately, formed Creeper and later added bassist Geoffrey Chisholm and drummer David Kostiner. Laguana says the quartet can literally feel the chemistry that makes it so appealing, although this isn't necessarily a comforting thing. "We've talked about this," he says. "It's like, 'Why us?' It just seems so arbitrary. We have friends in really good bands that we love, and that have been doing this longer than us, and they're struggling to get half the attention." The kind words of adoring fans and doting critics don't bring in too many pesos, however, so Creeper Lagoon still has to fight for acceptance on a more mainstream level. Laguana, who points out that he's broke--"I've got a quarter here, and I know there's a quarter behind the dresser," he says--explains that the band isn't willing to compromise its artistic integrity, but it does hope that financial success will follow the accolades. "We want to sell records," he says. "If you don't, you get dropped. You're left at 35 years old, no degree, no money and probably no girlfriend. "But I don't think it sounds like we were trying to make the next Third Eye Blind record," he continues. "I don't think we sound like a band that's trying to go for the commercial jugular vein. We took a lot of chances artistically." |
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