By: Baxtak

Preparing for aural slaughter at Tipper's 4321 event this weekend, Danny Grooves delivers Center Mass EP, giving us his 2 cents and an arsenal of bass buckshots.

Starting with “Signal-Type,” the EP opens in the form of post-sound design-craze bass-heavy neurohop, with what sounds like a focus to bring the groovy soul of hip-hop back to the forefront of operations. The deep alternating wubs on this do a fine job of telling you in transformer language that they want to be set free on a stack of Funktion-Ones. “Heatmiser” follows the same direction, giving you a little bit more of that heavy boom-bap sound.

Moving onto “Axis,” the barrage continuous as deep textural and multi-layered grooves, taking aesthetics influence from the early-day dubstep sound, while utilising the prevalent (and almost required) foley aesthetic of today's dubs. “Collision” takes a similar direction, with more focus on interlinking percussive elements and an old school British garage attitude. “Heads Bob” also fits this riddim portion of this release, bridging hip-hop soundbites with eerie tribal elements, jazzy chords, and a 'I will not sit still on the metro if this comes on my headphones' type attitude. Finally, “Wreckstyle” wraps off the bass-heavy offering with a strange evolution of styles, going from electronica synths to hybrid trap-esque mid-high-heavy wubs, before slowly descending and bringing closure to the EP with a curtain-fall piano diminuendo.

Overall, the songs are of a medium to short length, and they are very clearly made with the intention of a live dancefloor environment. Influences can be heard from recent Kursa & Seppa releases through Slug Wife with the 2 neurohop-ish tracks, and DEEP MEDi wubaramas of Mala et al. for the dubstep ones. To conclude, I can ensure anyone who may stumble upon a Danny Grooves set this summer that they will most likely get skanking and bass-facing to this.