Soap-Dodging Days

Australian trio The Omm Squad have notched up quite a few releases on various compilations over the years, and played at some of the country’s biggest outdoor parties to boot. This, their first full album, occasionally sounds a bit all over the place, but has some great moments. Phoenix starts things off in a pleasant and fluid way, combining elements of several different styles and sprinkling it all off with some cute fluffy topends that keeps it moving along. Wooden Nickel has a pounding, cyclic bottom end with various nightmare stabs across the top, all sounding rather random, while Panhandler goes utterly schitzo and loses most of the plot before it finds a groove. Geeza picks things up nicely, this is real nightmarey mangle-spangle trance, the cacophony works this time and it’s a really tasty, disturbing array of sounds chasing you around the dancefloor. Nice. Paralytic (Hippycrite Mix) is a jazzier ripsnorter, with a junglist breakdown and some amusing moments on the way up, Kanashibari is an oddball, mid-tempo breakbeat-ish confusenik, and Useless Information is a quirky, glitchy stomper with a couple of neat little tricks. The Random Designers turn in a remix of Phoenix, more rolling and staggered than the original, and finally Fractal Glider remixes Geeza, more spacious than the original and sounding much more like an oldskool goa tune; the original mix is head and shoulders above this (sorry Paul!) Soap-Dodging Days is an interesting release, and definitely worth a listen. The style on here isn’t cohesive and pigeon-hole-able, which is maybe the point; it’s certainly different.