BLACK DIAMOND HEAVIES, SSM European tour dates

SSM - European dates :
Jan 28 @ Club Ambassada - Morska Sobota , Slovenia
Jan 29 @ Klupce - Srenjanin, Serbia
Jan 30 @ Kestoo – Skopje, Macedonia
Jan 31 @ Lebowski - Plostliv, Bulgaria
Feb 1 @ Zica - Belgrade, Serbia
Feb 2 @ Kset - Zagreb , Croatia
Feb 4 @ Velvet - Torino , Italy
Feb 5 @ Casbah – Montova, Italy
Feb 6 @ Feedback - Perugia, Italy
Feb 7 @ Cuneo Cinema Vekkio - Alba, Italy
Feb 10 @ Kunstkeller - Nuremberg , Germany
Feb 11 @ Bar Mundial – Antwerpen, Belgium w/ Black Diamond Heavies
Feb 12 @ Db's - Utrecht , Netherlands
Feb 13 @ Le Gran Mix T – Tourcoing, France
Feb 14 @ L'appel D'air - St Brieuc, France w/Black Diamond Heavies
Feb 16 @ Sputnick Bar - Nantes, France
Feb 17 @ Donald's Pub - Tours, France
Feb 18 @ Rat Pack - Clermont Ferrand, France
Feb 19 @ Libanim - Nimes, France
Feb 20 @ Lapeniche - Chalon/Saone, France
Feb 21 @ Queen Kong Club - Neuchatel, Switzerland
Feb 24 @ Le Saint Des Seins – Toulouse, France w/ Black Diamond Heavies
Feb 25 @ Rock School Barbey – Bordeaux, France w/ Black Diamond Heavies
Feb 26 @ Woodstock Boogie Bar – Limoges, France
Feb 27 @ Buffet De La Gare - Marmande, France
Feb 28 @ Le Chaudron Baveur - Beauvais, France

BLACK DIAMOND HEAVIES - European dates :
Feb 7 @ Fuzz - La Roche sur Yon, France
Feb 9 @ My Way - Freiburg, Germany
Feb 10 @ Recylclart - Brussels, Belgium
Feb 11 @ Bar Mundial - Antwerpen, Belgium w/SSM
Feb 12 @ Parkhof - Alkmaar, Netherlands
Feb 13 @ 4AD - Diksmuid, Netherlands
Feb 14 @ L’appel d’air Trebry - St Brieuc, France w/SSM
Feb 17 @ Woodstock - Limoges, France
Feb 18 @ L’Assomoir - St Etienne, France
Feb 19 @ Le Mediator - Perpignan, France
Feb 20 @ La Peniche - Chalon sur Saone, France
Feb 21 Festival des nuits de l’Alligator Clermont Ferrand
Feb 23 @ Sputnick Bar - Nantes, France
Feb 24 @ le Saint des Seins - Toulouse, France w/SSM
Feb 25 @ Theatre Barbey - Bordeaux, France w/SSM
Feb 26 @ Wazemmes - Lille, France
Feb 27 TBA Calais, France
Feb 28 @ l’abordage - Evreux, France

SSM : Organ

ALBUM OF THE WEEK
SSM – Break Your Arm For Evolution (Alive) - Take Detroit garage punk rock ‘n roll and add a fine touch of that same city’s soul as a starting point then throw the whole thing right out the window and when the dust has settled and your mind has focussed a little, go back out and get it all back, brush it down then fizz it up and you have one hell of a three piece band. Deja Vu all over again and horizons are expanded. Sounds and flavours morphed in to some kind of post-new wave that you never really heard before. There’s moments here that really are right out beyond, no deja vu, this is not all over again. Detroit rock and soul and bits of kraut rock keys and transforming synth pop crashing in to the MC5 and hell, the Motor City threw up another one! And all of it drenched in the kind of cool as f soul Sly and The Family dished out at Woodstock - along with quirky Devo synths and so much musical guts and bits from here and there and sit back you got a tag. This is garage punk rock like you never heard it before. Clever energy that doesn’t get too clever, a band soaked in their heritage and their fizzing synths and their reconstruction of deconstructed popular music and what you have is one highly original sound from one very original band. The whole thing regenerating in your face without every losing sight of the simply constructed convention of the rock song . Brilliant album, inspired and inspiring – Organ magazine

SSM - AMG

SSM's blend of electronic sheen, prog rock sonic wanderlust, and punk rock wallop remains a potent combination on their second full-length album, 2008's Break Your Arm for Evolution, and if this doesn't push the group's musical boundaries terribly far beyond what they accomplished on their previous releases, it demonstrates they're writing and playing better than ever. Marty Morris, Dave Shettler, and John Szymanski have learned the fine art of honoring their myriad musical influences while twisting the shapes into new angles, and though the common link between this album's nine tunes is that you can dance to all of them, they each shake it out in different and distinct ways. The geeked-out guitar-fueled gangsterism of "Regenerate Your Face" probably wouldn't occur to very many acts besides these guys, "Déjà Vu" is so new wave you can practically hear the skinny tie rustling against the cheesy synthesizers, "Start Dancing" could pass for a long-lost Suicide track in dim light, "Marian" is a tribute to some righteous soul fan that generates a potent booty-shaking groove, and "Now We're Six" takes A.A. Milne places he's never been before. The production (by SSM with some help from Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys) manages to sound full-bodied, clear, and just the right kind of trashy at the same time, and the jams hit a graceful balance between funky and clever -- Break Your Arm for Evolution is that rare album that promises if you free your ass your brain will follow, and the best moments deliver on that heady guarantee. - Mark Deming / All Music Guide

SSM - PopMatters

Garage synth? Dance fuzz? What the hell is this?

The three men who make up SSM have roots in the midwestern garage rock underground. Keyboardist John Szymanski comes from the Hentchmen, drummer Dave Shettler from the Sights, and guitarist Marty Morris from the Cyril Lords. They recruited Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys to record this debut album. And their label, Alive, distributes through Bomp Records. Yet, despite all these indications, Break Your Arm for Evolution is not a garage rock record in any traditional Sonics/Stooges/Dolls sense. Rather, it has shreds of funk, swathes of guitar-soloing cock metal, and intervals of synthy dance beats. It mutates from song to song, shifting from the heavy sludge of “Regenerate Your Face” to the electro-lightness of “Start Dancing” without skipping a beat. You wonder what the principals would say, cornered at a party or meeting a friend by chance on a street corner, when asked the inevitable question, “So, what kind of music is it?”

The answer is, it depends. In “Déjà vu,” the album’s opening track, the style veers towards gleeful funk rock, a head-first dive into the stop-start rhythms of, say, the Spin Doctors, buoyed by dance-friendly keyboard rhythms and split in half by a shredding, distorted guitar solo. “Johnny’s Holding for the First Time” is a martial chant paced by snare drums and prone, at the chorus, to thick plasticky walls of synthesizer and guitar. And “Regenerate Your Face” combines gangsta attitude ("Bitches to the left / Bitches to the right") with heavy blues rock riffs, a genetic splice of two of Detroit’s best-known musical styles.

These first three songs are the album’s heaviest outings. With them out of the way, the band turns lighter and more playful. “Start Dancing” opens with a almost a minute of synthetic percussion and keyboards, all clinks and pings and syncopation, before the melody begins. After the distortion and density of three songs, it feels almost transparent, bubble-fragile and unserious. “Marian”, which follows, is similarly light-footed, its clattery, funk-inflected drums running rampant under a spoken-sung chant that sounds a little like early Beck. Here SSM turns, almost, into a jam band, romping over free-flowing, syncopated rhythms with an insouciant, sunny-day charm. It’s an unexpected turn to the left, a song that has nothing whatsoever to do with earlier tracks from the album, but clearly a highlight.

With “Let’s Make a Baby”, there’s another shift, this time towards robot new wave/funk, like the Human League crossed with KC and the Sunshine Band. This song, and the following one, a Winnie-the-Pooh rip called “Now We’re Six”, have you wondering if the men of SSM are on the verge of family-hood, maybe painting a spare room pastel pink or blue. And that’s fine, because really, the only genre they haven’t dipped into on Break Your Arm For Evolution is kiddie rock. It’s always good to save something for the second album. - Jennifer Kelly / Pop Matters

SSM "Break Your Arm For Evolution" Les Inrocks review

SSM - Metro Times

Is this album a self-inflicted test to see if de-evolution can be willed into being? An admission of futility in the face of a dearth of other options? An inspired experiment?

Well, as evidenced on SSM's second proper full-length — let's go with "all the above." The record starts simply enough, with a quasi-conventional rough house analog throwback stomper called "Déjà Vu." It's a Farfisa-and-"punk-as-shit"-monotone-vocals-led number that reels and spirals as it rocks along. After that, Break Your Arm... throws you in the deep water of wildly inventive, wildly unpredictable jams that alternately leave you stunned, dancing, bent, sweating or hitting "repeat" to try to figure out just what exactly they were doing on that last track. This is a rock record that could absolutely only be made by people from Detroit, circa now. SSM throw away the rawk rules here (although "Emotional Tourist" is a full-sprint, bleeding overdrive banger), remaining true to their subversive spirit.

After the woozy march of "Johnny's Holding for the First Time" (ha!), you get nailed with the first of the album's trio of centerpiece jams. "Start Dancing" kicks it off, hitting you with Morris intoning and then repeating the cryptic, downbeat refrain "Daddy won't leave/If you don't stop dancing"

Not content to merely pollute your buzz with introspection, the album's centerpiece trilogy then really takes off with "Marian." The latter's a post-post-industrial Madchester workout that starts with a sound reminiscent of hyperactive whales mating, before locking into the kind of groove the Stone Roses would have killed for — that is, the kind of swing that blurs the line between dance music, practice space rock 'n' roll freakout, mechanics and magic. It's good. It's that good. They then return to planet earth for the spacious robo-boogie of "Let's Make a Baby," neatly rounding out the libidinal conflict with lyrics that read alternately '60s garage naïve and then emotionally (and astrologically) warped.

SSM pump up the volume not simply to be loud, but to amplify a freaked-out perspective, chronicling the modern sound of a fucked-up place with as much honest idiosyncrasy as Joy Division did in 1980 Manchester, Os Mutantes did in Brazil '68 or, well, Black Merda did in 1970s Detroit. If anything, Break Your Arm For Evolution is the sound of enlightened craftsmen working their machines over, extracting sweat and bile, paranoia, swing and joy from the guts of organs, drums, guitars, digital toys and seemingly any other knob within reaching distance. As recorded by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, Break Your Arm is more immediate and forceful than SSM's debut album. That immediacy is in the songs, and this set is as fine and full of powerful strangeness and truth as any you're apt to hear. Now, go and get it at your local record shop. - Chris Handyside / Metro Times

SSM - Detour

SSM’s 2006 debut totally forced the issue, ramming a prog proboscis into any available garage rock orifice. Gross, right? But the record totally worked, particularly when the Detroit trio’s flair for the lyrical fantastic really jibed with Marty Morris’s rock-n-roll moan (he’s from the Cyril Lords, remember), John Szymanski’s rack of vintage keys (Szymanski from the Hentchman, that is), and drummer-about-town Dave Shettler, who propelled the whole bit from an electro-disco land of willing women and readily available drugs. Shit was addicting, especially live.

Now, remember what was written about the band’s set at the Detour Launch Party. “If psyche-garage-stoner-disco isn’t an official genre, it will be by the time SSM release their new record in 2008.” No lie there. The mechanized and caterwauling center riff of “Deja Vu” is what plays in the heads of those who do the robot, or maybe the tin heads of all robots, while “Regenerate Your Face” builds from blowsy-stoned riffs that ooze off the fruit of the moon. “Start Dancing” threads a motorik beat into a chiming chorus built from 60s garage rock, then dissipates like oxygen released in a vacuum, while “Now We’re Six” and the anxious gas pedal headache of “Emotional Tourist” wind some hooky crackle into the mix to ensure a little of what the first album’s experiments occasionally lacked. Break Your Arm for Evolution still turns star charts into question marks, but it grooves clean like the 2.0 version of anything. SSM aren’t just talking about an evolution. — Johnny Loftus

Tags: SSM, John Szymanski, Dave Shettler, Marty Morris, Break Your Arm for Evolution, Alive Records, Cyril Lords, Hentchmen

SSM "Break Your Arm For Evolution" in stores now!

Los Angeles, CA – January 28, 2007 – Detroit post-punk trio SSM will release their new album Break Your Arm For Evolution tomorrow via Alive Records! Last week, the band wrapped up a month-long tour with the Von Bondies and garnered rave album reviews from the New York Times to the Washington Post and URB Magazine (featured in URB’s “Next 1000’). Additional tour dates and album news will be announced shortly.

Break Your Arm for Evolution is the follow-up to their acclaimed 2006 self-titled debut and finds John Szymanski of the infamous Hentchmen on vox/keyboards, Dave Shettler of The Sights on drums/programming, and Marty Morris of the Cyril Lords on vox/guitar further expanding their sonic horizons and fearlessly morphing genres. Engineered by Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys), and recorded in record time straight to seven-track tape, the Detroit trio once again defy conventional wisdom and blaze its own trail creating music that is the sound of cool, young robots; and the preferred listening of the jetpack set.

For more information, please visit the band on the web

Free “Déjà Vu” MP3

Video for “Déjà Vu”

SSM – BREAK YOUR ARM FOR EVOLUTION

“The kind of distortion that edges the vocals and most of the instruments on the album “Break Your Arm for Evolution” (Alive) tags SSM as garage-rock or psychedelia, and most of the songs would go nicely with a liquid-blob light show. But this three-man band — John Szymanski on keyboards, Dave Shettler on drums and Marty Morris on guitar — doesn’t stay within any particular school or era. SSM also toys with electro, progressive rock and punk-funk. What the songs share is a cantankerous rock spirit…” - New York Times

“Using keyboards, vocals, guitar, drums and sweet, sweet programming, SSM is out to prove that they aren't afraid to go against the grain. Chances are they'd be more afraid to follow it.” - URB Magazine’s “Next 1000”

“…funk, synth-pop, glam-rock and psychedelia…"Break Your Arm for Evolution" certainly isn't technocratic enough for electro purists, but SSM can show garage-rock buffs that there's more than one way to start dancing.” - Washington Post

“A romp in Iggy-esque, slowed down, Hentch rock 'n' roll, the band’s overall sound is something that is catchy, groovy and danceable, all while maintaining the basic rock esthetic. Tracks like “Déjà Vu,” “Regenerate Your Face” and “Now We’re Six” are trance-inducing psychedelic jams that meet Fun House-type grooves and would be perfect for your next drug session.” - Real Detroit Weekly

“…an unusual and delightfully schizoid take on Motor City rock. Psychedelia mingled with kraut-rock as the avant-pop trio shifted gears with synth freakouts and odd time signatures that managed to be both experimental and accessible at the same time.” - Boston Herald

“SSM deviate from the classic Detroit rock band mold. They have mixed garage rock with psychedelia, electric dance sounds and prog rock and come out with a unique sound…The new album sounds like Daft Punk-meet-Electric Six-meet-The Seeds, with a couple emotional ballads thrown in as well as some pop-dance tracks.” - The Aquarian Weekly

“SSM, play a riveting combination of electronic and psychedelic garage rock—physical proof of which can be found on the trio’s latest, Break Your Arm for Evolution.” - Time Out New York

“…their second album for Alive Records, John Szymanski, Dave Shettler, and Marty Morris have updated a steadfastly rigid genre with a synthetic, robot groove that bridges the divide between Detroit's storied histories of techno and garage.” - I Rock Cleveland

“Taking the more danceable side of post-punk from Public Image Limited and meshing it with '80s pop projects like Gary Numan and Kraftwerk’s synth-laden material, SSM creates a killer sound that blows most conventional stuff out of the water.” - Real Detroit Weekly

“…return of the vox-heavy trio, now flirting with robot love under the hand of The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach” - CityBeat

SSM - Washington Post

Washington Post review of "Break Your Arm For Evolution"

SINCE SSM IS A DETROIT garage-rock band composed of three Detroit garage-rock veterans, it's fitting that the group's second album opens with a song titled "Deja Vu." Yet not everything on "Break Your Arm for Evolution" has been heard before -- at least not quite this way.

Named for the musicians's initials, SSM can power a bluesy stomp just as heartily as the former bands of keyboardist John Szymanski (the Hentchmen), drummer Dave Shettler (the Sights) and guitarist Marty Morris (the Cyril Lords). But the trio also ventures into funk, synth-pop, glam-rock and psychedelia.

"Start Dancing" (MP3) is representative of SSM's style. The song opens with pure synthetics: pings and coos arrayed against a tinny pulse. The accompaniment remains all electronic after the vocals enter, but the guitar and drums gradually take their usual place, and the tune becomes a rocker -- though the track isn't the album's most traditional one. (That would be the punky "Emotional Tourist.") "Break Your Arm for Evolution" certainly isn't technocratic enough for electro purists, but SSM can show garage-rock buffs that there's more than one way to start dancing.- Mark Jenkins

SSM - New York Times

New York Times review of "Break Your Arm For Evolution" :
The kind of distortion that edges the vocals and most of the instruments on the album “Break Your Arm for Evolution” (Alive) tags SSM as garage-rock or psychedelia, and most of the songs would go nicely with a liquid-blob light show. But this three-man band — John Szymanski on keyboards, Dave Shettler on drums and Marty Morris on guitar — doesn’t stay within any particular school or era. SSM also toys with electro, progressive rock and punk-funk. What the songs share is a cantankerous rock spirit and, behind it, musings on life and death, from “Let’s Make a Baby” to thoughts like “Before long you’re gone, so prolong the inevitable” — which is tucked into a song called “Start Dancing.” -- Jon Pareles

SSM - Aquarian Weekly

SSM - URB Magazine

URB Magazine review of "Break Your Arm For Evolution":
Don't be disappointed when you find out that the name "SSM" is derived from from the first letter of each member's last name; while not the most colorful method of coming up with a title for a band, their music is much more creative. The trio from Detroit don't do a whole lot using traditional methods. In fact, their latest album in the works- Break Your Arm For Evolution was recorded straight to seven-track tape. In a world of undo, cut and paste, that is quite a ballsy decision. Using keyboards, vocals, guitar, drums and sweet, sweet programming, SSM is out to prove that they aren't afraid to go against the grain. Chances are, they'd be more afraid to follow it. - James Shahan

SSM - XLR8R

SSM - Déjà Vu video, I Rock Cleveland

SSM new video



It's common knowledge that you can't teach an old garage band new tricks. Or, at least I thought it was common knowledge that garage bands forever stayed in the garage, until I put on this new track by SSM, "Start Dancing." On this number from their second album for Alive Records, John Szymanski, Dave Shettler, and Marty Morris have updated a steadfastly rigid genre with a synthetic, robot groove that bridges the divide between Detroit's storied histories of techno and garage. Szymanski's cool, detached plea to stay on the dance floor isn't the most convincing order to get down -- it's as robotic as the groove behind him. Perhaps, that's the point. With the news of a Japanese robot who can play the violin, why shouldn't robots be able to dance, too? - I Rock Cleveland