Steve Mills, Sterling Moss, Mobile Dogwash, Jack Wax – Braingravy 04 (Braingravy)

With its stellar line-up of Moss, Mills, Dogwash and Wax, Braingravy 4 always promised great things, and lo! Great things have come to pass.

Ride the Snake by Sterling Moss and Steve Mills leads off, and there is indeed something slithering about it – like a vast, mutated alligator feeding off luckless sewer workers beneath the city streets. Accordingly the track gets more and more corpulent, bottoms out to a cavernous, echo-strewn breakdown and then treats you to a delayed drop that, when it comes – when it eventually comes – tears off the back of your head. And that’s a good thing.

With a Parsnip is business as usual for Dogwash. i.e it rocks like a bastard. And how do they get those acid lines so damn filthy? After that, Burnout, from Jack Wax drops the old-school acid, 303 that couldn’t be more different from Dogwash if it tried. In terms of the EP it’s a brilliant change of pace, and hats off for that, while as far as the track itself goes, I’ve got one word: whoosh. It’s a builder, a grower. The kind of tune that like maggots festering beneath an aluminium cranial insert, will gradually burrow its way into your brain. And that, again, is a good thing.

Get it from: Juno Download

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OB1 – SUF Projects 012 (SUF Projects)

New from OB1, aka Olly Berry, comes this double-drop from SUF Projects, and it’s the business. As ever, Berry delivers a commanding, dirty-but-funky 303 experience, announced with a rush of far-off sirens and the main vocal line ‘Basic Chemistry’,  a sample from Breaking Bad. It’s used brilliantly here, too; rather than simply lift it, Berry’s attacked it with a pair of garden shears, buried it in the garden for a week, then exhumed it*, so it’s got a real distorted, decayed sound, and when the track breaks down at 2.50 into an extended sample it’s as though we’re hearing it from within the depths of a nightmare trip. Fantastisch!

Clearly Berry’s been caning the Breaking Bad, cos the flip The One Who Knocks rolls out a second quote, this one with an even more fearful edge to it. Pair it with a more ravey, drum and bass vibe and this is choice material. So choice that there’s very little to choose between this and Basic Chemistry, but if you forced me to choose, if you really forced, like, if you threatened to take away my eyeholes, then I’d pick The One Who Knocks.

Get it: 909 London

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* Because that’s how you achieve that effect, right?

Acid Kazuals, Mobile Dogwash – Chase Yer Tail 05 (CYTD005)

Eyedropper from Acid Kazuals is an absolutely killer track, the whole thing teetering on the edge of crazy distortion, much like the narrator of the tale around which it’s built, who’s out for a walk when a tripping guy squirts an eyedropper full of acid – twenty or thirty hits’ worth, he reckons – into his mouth. “I realised I was in trouble,” he says, with commendable understatement, and the nightmare begins, soundtrack, this: acid like chainsaws, filthy riffs scuffing in the background, the whole thing seething with the ominous, something’s-about-to-go-horribly-wrong feel of The Gift. Miss it at your peril.

Next up is Make People Run by Mobile Dogwash vs Steve Getz , and it’s another scary sample, this one from Dexter (I think), underpinned by metallic 90s techno and of course a patented Dogwash acid line. It’s surpassed by the next track, Git Yer Freak On, mainly by virtue of those obese peak-time chords that slice through the second half of the tune. Lastly Total Shitstorm is Dogwash seen through the prism of vintage Stay Up Forever. Imagine any tune by Magnum Force torn apart by a pack of dogs and reassembled by silent children with no faces. Yeah, that evil. And then, just when you think you have the measure of it, a murderous acid line appears and the sky tears open. It’s a barnstorming end to yet another essential Chase Yer Tail release.

Get it from: 909 London

Digital goodies on the Braingravy train

So, Braingravy, one of the most exciting of the new labels, has now gone digital, which is great for those of us with mothballed decks, even more so when you consider what a tasty line-up label boss Steve Mill has managed to secure, past present and future.

To kick things off Mills has reissued Braingravy 01 to 03. I haven’t sprung for 01 yet, but I can say that 02 and 03 rule – six tracks of engine-room Acid Techno featuring a mouthwatering array of talent, old and new. In the new camp, Jamie Taylor’s Tik Tok and Olly Berry’s OB1 both feature, with the latter on Braingravy 02 providing the scintillating, Jello Biafra-sampling banger Won’t Get Fooled Again. Keeping him company on 02 is Rene Reiter’s 18 Years Old Cat on Acid, a hard but quirky track with a broken beat feel to it, as well as Sterling Moss and Steve Mills’ Electric Landlady, which boasts an almost eerie, echo-flavoured break. Meanwhile, on 03, the aforementioned Tik Tok drops That’s Got to Change, a clean-lined banger. No More Fucking Rock n Roll by Dave the Drummer, Chris Liberator and Steve Mills is phat but still isn’t the highlight, that honour going to the hideously addictive Acid Underground from Mr Mills himself.

Meanwhile, number 04 is ready for take-off, with tracks from Jack Wax, Sterling Moss & Steve Mills and Mobile Dogwash – an utterly superb line-up if ever there was one, and due out January 21. Braingravy take control, indeed.

Get it from: Juno Download