Sleepfreaks - Crash / Distant Mellow

Prog house can often have a tendency to plod along at a fairly pedestrian speed, with rather woolly percussion, before falling into a chasm of a breakdown which it never fully recovers from. Step forward the Sleepfreaks: I'm a fan of a lot of their work but this release has to be my favourite. At the time this came out I felt they injected a much needed rush of energy into a genre that was quickly growing in danger of ascending up it's own rectum, as well as applying a chugging tech-trancey vibe, stripping out the cheesy melodic and over-worked hooks and employing a single-note bassline throughout. Even the breakdowns provided only a brief respite before the energy kicked back in to take it up a notch. 'Crash' is a masterful piece of simplistic, driving prog-trance that builds it's hypnotic furor over the full length of the track, making you want to stick around until the end when the last gasp of urgent energy leaves you breathless. 'Distant Mellow' pitches a more sophisticated set of pads and percussion over a driving, increasingly aggressive hook that's insistent to the point of cutting the mid-placed break to a few brief seconds before we're heading back into the milieu. A pair of bombs, in the nicest sense of the word.