Gridlock - The Synthetic Form

Gridlock's debut album. While its beginning to sound a but dated, its still a classic in my view. The normal tracks have washy beats with low, raspy vocals. Its pretty hard to make out what he's saying.. but then again I guess it doesn't really matter with this music. There is 5 interlude tracks, which in my opinion really connect the other songs... short dark ambient tracks that do a good job of phasing the tracks together into the new sound. As a bonus you get 2 remixes but they are nothing special and don't sound that much different than the originals. This album is becoming hard to get, as its now out of print.

This CD is a mostly forgettable venture into downtempo electronic body music verging on power-noise. About every track you'll hear is high on distortion but none of them really brought much that I hadn't already heard several times already from other artists. The one stand-out track, however, is 'Pulvis et Umbra Sumus' which definitely brings :wumpscut: to mind, but surpasses any of his material in my opinion (though I'm really not a :wumpscut: fan anyways). Just about everything else on the album, though largely experimental, still sounds like standard filler material and nothing else really popped out for me. The few people I've introduced to this CD had a similar diagnosis as well.

If you're a fan of this sort of music it may be worth your while to ask yourself if it would be worth the price of a whole CD for only one great track and seventeen poor/mediocre ones. But, then again, you could find something else here that you'd like... just not anything you couldn't find released by someone else.