Dryft - Ventricle (2010)

Ventricle is the latest album from Mike Cadoo's long dormant Dryft side-project. The album deviates from Cadoo's current main project Bitcrush just as previous Dryft efforts strayed from his previous group Gridlock. This time, however, it’s fair to describe Dryft as bearing more resemblance to Cadoo’s past than to any passing flirtation with fringe genres. Moreover, like a message in a bottle, it is as though all that Cadoo had failed to completely express through Gridlock had been stored away subconsciously and now, as Ventricle, that bottle has finally washed ashore. While Cadoo is the first to acknowledge the stylistic similarities between Ventricle and his contributions to Gridlock, he warns against making specific comparisons. This is new music. Caveats aside, the massive, enveloping drones and rusty clatter that anchored his former band are omnipresent. Powered by overdriven, symphonic walls of slowly evolving melodies matched with rhythms that recall the drum-n-bass of Cell (2000), the industrial battery of Gridlock and the jammed funk of his Mytotyc Exyt EP (2002), Ventricle is a true opus that offers revolution and retrospective in one. No matter the degree of hyperbole applied, the term “side-project” has never felt more out of place.