(03.01.05) Pounded Mass is not just another addition to the infinite list of SR releases. It’s a solid album that flows from the beginning to the end without losing tension, it mixes various influences with trademark Somatic Responses sounds and it’s so good, it’s hard to believe. The spooky intro prepares you for a couple of smashers; first comes “Noggings Revenge,” a techno breakbeat mutant, and then the industrial armageddon called “Dead Space.” At this point you should be so satisfied that you would be ready for a filler track, but suddenly comes “Bathrobe Brawl V1,” hip-hop revisited and reconstructed by the Healy bros. A simple raw break is used as a base for light speed turntablism with industrial distorted samples. I hope at this point of the review you are already drooling on your keyboard. If you are still reading and you are not running to your local music shop yet, let me tell you what else you can find on Pounded Mass.
There are some standard SR tracks, but they sound somewhat better than the previous works, I think it’s a kind of alchemy. The title track and the explicit “The Day IDM Crawled Up Its Own Arse” are a terrific sonic assault, loads of powerful distortion hit in you in the face, ranging from fractured rhythms to hammering four-to-the-floor beats. If it wasn’t enough, just after those two monsters comes “Clode D” that is a 200+ BPM drum’n’acid killer. Luckily enough, you can relax with another hip-hop influenced track, “Spam Shandy,” a sublime snappy break embedded in an anguishing atmosphere of synths and scratches. Apparently, Somatics got angry because some people pigeonholed their music with the much-hated IDM term. If these are the results, I’m about to send ’em a thousand emails telling they are my favorite IDM act, so they’ll hopefully get even more angry and release another masterpiece like this.
Pounded Mass is out now on Hymen.
