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

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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

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The kind of distortion that edges the vocals and most of the instruments on the album "Break Your Arm for Evolutio" (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 / The New York Times

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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" 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. - Marck Jenkins / Washington Post

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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. - Jennifer Kelly / Pop Matters

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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

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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

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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 / Urb Magazine

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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 / Detour

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By nature, garage rock is fuzzy, not fussy, and followers of trashy '60s punk aren't generally known for musicianship or sonic adventurism. The Detroit trio SSM — named for Motor City mainstays John Szymanski, Dave Shettler, and Marty Morris — is a rare exception. On its second album, the band has once again created hard-rocking headphone music, mixing raw Stooges guitars with fidgety licks of sci-fi synth. SSM's mutant sound comes in a variety of tempos and textures, and the dry electronic pulse of "Start Dancing" somehow sits comfortably alongside the percussive free-for-all and dull throb of "Marian." Some of the songs push five and six minutes, and though SSM knows how to write verses and choruses, the tunes almost always wriggle free from their structures, allowing the musicians to stretch out and play. Even a quickie blues stomp like "Now We're Six," perhaps the disc's most formulaic offering, manages to feel formless. The constant experimentation is both an asset and a liability, and it's easy to get lost in the group's more nebulous instrumental passages. If SSM's neo-garage peers too often color within the lines, "Break Your Arm for Evolution" charges forward with a modern-art degree and two fistfuls of crayons. Even when it's a mess — as with the atonal freak-out that ends "Underground" — it sure is colorful. - Kenneth Partridge / Hartford Courant

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Imagine if aliens came down took said favorite garage rockers, took their Stooges filled record collections and cryogenically froze them only to be thawed out in the year 2050. Still youthful looking and full of scruffy bearded vigor, SSM would be given futuristic guitars, organs and drums by their alien captors and told to create music. The result would probably sound something like Break Your Arm For Evolution. A romp in Iggy-esq, slowed down, Hentch rock and 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. While these songs do a good job of showing SSM variety of sounds, tunes like “Emotional Tourist” are the group at their most garage. Showing where they started out, they do a traditional twelve bar blues cranked up to 11 and Szymanski’s organ works on overdrive. This is a standout jam, but doesn’t fully represent what SSM is working towards with the record as a whole. Personally for myself, the more interesting numbers on Break Your Arm For Evolution come in the form of dance numbers like “Underground,” “Start Dancing” and “Marian.” Taking the more danceable side of post-punk from Public Image Limited and meshing it with 80’s 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. - Boogie Chillin