SSS is a Philadelphia duo, currently representing the talents of Shane Riley and Morgan Garrett. Do not conflate them with the English thrash band SSS (Short Sharp Shock), they are much more interesting than warmed-over DRI tribute ever could be. Truly, the SSS I want to talk about tonight comes out of the left field. The project is not at all the sum of Shane Riley's soundboard torture tapes or Morgan Garrett's sedated, worn-through pop with Scream Culture. Their label Decoherence describes the project as "almost music" which is almost too accurate as far as epithets go. I think the best way to approach SSS's self-titled LP is as a dance record, but one that points to the discoloration that haunts all dance music that is distributed as a stand-alone listening experience. The reason that I say this, is because the record appears to labor over extremely motivated grooves, energy patterns that beg you to match their motion, but whose general structure makes coordinating your movements to them in any intelligible pattern a paradoxical proposition.
Dance music is meant to be enjoyed in public, as a social exercise of mass cooperation and communion. But most dance music is enjoyed like any other type of music, flowing into a solitary set of ears in a demarcated, personalized part of an office or domicile. In other words, most dance music is listened to while the listener is alone and likely physically inert. Your vegetated isolation is not a problem for SSS. Their music is a machine onto itself. It thrives in isolation, daring you to observe it and its transgressive detours. Daring you to push further into the squealing knifes edge of its protuberances only to have your pores juiced and your organs pushed out of place. The rhythms are just too janked out for a human body to fit inside, and yet, they are there begging for your communion. The gambol that SSS inspires then is contained entirely within the mind of the observer- a mental stress test where you are tasked with finding a throughline of coherent, rhythmic logic. One that doesn't feed your face-first into an alien compost trench full of worms the size of resting fawns, hankering to reduce your comestible bits into fuzz-pedal infused, fertilizer.
All this is missing the forest from the trees a bit though. At this point, I'm sure you're just curious whether SSS's self-titled LP is good or not. And to that, I say... it's pretty fucked up... but fucked up in an intriguing kind of way.
