Polyrhythmic Sludge Doom. Now there’s something you don’t hear every day.
Two-man outfit Reido come from a funeral doom background, but have since moved on into more experimental territory with ‘Minus Eleven’. The guitars are downtuned and crushing, pounding along with a perverse mechanical precision like some malfunctioning industrial machinery, all blunt edges and clanking blades, whilst the drums thud away in an organic and fluid fashion and stark, baleful melodies weave their way through it all.

Opener ‘Violence and Destruction’ is excellent, its straightforward sludgy dredging joined by savage, up-tempo bursts of sudden urgency, a mid-section of spaced- out, monolithic riffs, and a final lockdown into a bouncy, awkward Meshuggah-esque groove. It’s unpretentious, catchy as hell and effortlessly heavy, accentuated by some very solid gravelly, barked vocals. ‘Degeneration Cycle’ meanwhile is rooted in an ugly, Godflesh-like rhythm that continually breaks through the dirty doom riffs and stop-start chugging to drag everything back down into the slime.

Reido’s roots in ultra-bleak funeral doom mix in interesting ways with all this industrial grime, so that on occasion the listener suddenly finds themselves within that same black temple of downtuned despair explored so exhaustively on Celtic Frost’s magnificent Monotheist album. It’s evocative rather than imitative, and appropriately spectral in presence; a crunchy and menacing bass chug here; a blackened-doom gallop and dread-drenched strain of melody there, lurking at the periphery and bringing an added atmospheric dimension to the music; a meeting of arcane occultism and heavy industry. ‘The Six Day War’ for example marries relentless slow-motion thrash hooks with huge, ultra-downtuned riffs that buckle and bend as they spill out into the void, these depressive plunges and despairing and dirgey melodic fragments culminating in a final bloody-minded and chugging upwards slog.

The band even manage to bring in some gothic doom onto the cd without it sounding incongruous; brief closer ‘Flows and Eruptions’ opens with morose clean chords that could be from My Dying Bride’s ‘Songs of Darkness….’ album, an immensely dense black-hole riff joined by sorrowful and wavering refrains of mournful melodic doom. It’s disarming just how effortless they manage to make this sound.

‘Minus Eleven’ is at once a sophisticated and entirely straightforward album. Polyrhythms abound throughout and no mistake, but there’s nothing of a headscratching nature to be found; despite its awkward and gleefully malevolent feel it remains completely immediate thanks to the overabundance of massive, industrial-strength riffs on offer. The songwriting is excellent, the band knowing just when to rein it in and when to let loose, so that the songs never cease to engage despite their inherently repetitive nature. There’s little to complain about here. The atmosphere is thick, and the riffs are twisted, crushing and bleak, but endlessly gratifying above all. If Meshuggah and Celtic Frost ever made a collaborative album, chances are it would sound like this.

(8.5/10 Erich Zann)

http://www.myspace.com/reidosystemcom