Inner Panic – Manic Dragon

I’m liking the cover, I’m liking the tunes, and I’m liking that you get a bonus mixed 2nd CD for your buck. Sequipa opens with Manic Panic, a nice slice of rolling doof from Brazil. 148bpm and reverb-heavy, an enormous break gives way into sounds that lazily tear squat party venues apart, before an even more enormous break kicks in and offers up an awesome industrial run, ravey and wavey and undeniably kickin’. The delightfully deranged Sungirl’s Future isn’t her best, with less energy going on than we might expect and a groove that sounds like its legs are giving way. Not so for Toxic’s wonderful Titus, a veritable anthem-thru-a-blender that shifts and drops and pops like nobody’s business. The bassline’s joyously skitty with changes everywhere, and the melodies don’t stop coming in to change the vibe back and forth. Menog & Mr Peculiar sounds like a tasty enough collaboration, and Trapped is an utter stormer. Bridging the gap between darker sounds and conventional fullon, it takes a good five minutes of nice layering and changes before the two producers’ sounds properly meld and create an overflowing, hard-pushing sound that just propels itself forward. Procs Broken Image People is deliciously psychedelic, with the kinda of scattered and forgetful sound that you don’t hear much these days. It takes normal trance formula and locks it in the basement for being naughty, with dropped beats and a generally tricky-to-dance to vibe going on. Bass sounds are borrowed from mid-skool jungle, acidhouse layers are more plentiful than mushrooms in Camden, and by the end you’re wondering what the hell you’ve got to mix out of it. Lush. After this sojourn into some mad Swede’s mind, Penta’s Esta Noche smoulders in like a meteor. One of the best Penta tracks I’ve heard, it’s bloody brilliant and squarely in the territory of ‘avin it nighttime fullon, but has a sense of humour to boot and a couple of little false turns and quirks make all the difference. Critical State from Naked Tourist has some of their native Berlin’s techno influences, definitely with one foot in the bundes-stomp… harsh, caustic nighttime sounds bash you and bash you, until the surprisingly smooth and bubbling acid comes through to drive you off into the Emergency department. CPC’s Flaish is pure evil, and I mean pure evil. It rips your organs out and then sells them back to you on ebay. It puts cigarette butts into all your beer bottles, then offers you them to drink in the dark. It comes along and moves all your friends at a forest party so you can’t find anyone, and when you do find them you can’t find your carkeys so you spend ages looking for them in the overgrown bits at the side, treading in piss and shit and needles and god knows what else. (You get the idea). Vector Selector’s Arapahoe closes the show, a very odd piece of music if ever there was one. Rolling outdoor bassline jostles with electro-ey synth runs, samples-aplenty, and a general atonal seasick vibe going on… but one assumes this was the idea. Overall then this is a pretty damn neat collection, standouts being those tunes from Menog/Mr P, Penta and CPC. A solid first album from another partner in pushing the darker sounds forward this year.

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