Review Summary: Gridlock - Formless: The seamless integration of noise and beauty, sine waves and distortion, calm and chaos.
Review by shadowcast
With each successive release, Gridlock moves forward through a world built of abstract shapes and a broad tonal spectrum. Starting with "The Synthetic Form", Gridlock fused industrial sounds with a forward thinking electronic sensibility, creating a truly harsh atmosphere rarely heard in the industrial/electronic scene. Next came the innovative "Further", exploding out of the industrial carcass with emotion-steeped ambience and noisy, abrasive rhythms. "Trace" took the concept even further, leaving barely a trace of "industrial" in favor of harsh, more intelligent rhythms and beautiful flowing ambience.
"Formless" continues the trend, forging a new sound in a sea of near-plagiarisms and masturbatory "experimenters". Gridlock sounds like no one, and no one sounds like Gridlock. True innovators, their synthetic ambiences contrast the off-kilter rhythms like no other. Calm, warm melodies drench the cold steel of the rhythmic structure, a burst of static rails against the serenity of the soft ambience. An entire world is born in this album, one of perfectly balanced contrasts, a beauty that can only be reached by a perfect juxtaposition of the serene and the chaotic.
Embrace the new sonic empire.
