Drowned in Sound have included Gnod Dropout with White Hills in their write up on the current Manchester scene, they say:
Despite a slew of cassettes and MP3s since 2007 – including a previous CD-R with their collaborators here – little was known of mysterious psychedelics Gnod, the group hiding behind a curtain of different sound textures and hard-to-pinpoint world influences, and spending most of their time in Europe. Created by a seemingly ever changing line-up of disparate musicians picked up from both their native Salford and from travels abroad, these releases often crept out unannounced, the group’s appearances in Greater Manchester largely restricted to their own head quarters of Salford’s newly refurbished Islington Mill.
The assistance of Los Angeles’ White Hills however aided them in the production of their most defined statement yet. On Drop Out…II, Gnod step away from the hazy atmospherics and directionless squalls of their other work to let slip an album of real intent. It takes just over a minute to ensnare its listener, the false start of ‘Bits’ giving way to a writhing snake of a bass line that slithers through ‘Run-A-Round’s’ murky undergrowth, burying itself deeper and deeper amidst chemically enhanced Middle Eastern drones, which in turn intermingle with more stoical European krautrock influences. The pace of the album rises and falls without ever loses its hypnotic grip, descents into the loose noises of ‘Streams’ and ‘The Society Of Ants’ are often short lived, the band re-appearing from the haze with harsher bass lines and larger walls of sound. The album’s piece-de-resistance is the towering ‘Spaced Man’ which feeds the angry feedback of Spaceman 3 a valium and gives it space to calmly unravel over thirteen out-of-body minutes. Not just the best album to come out of Manchester in 2010, one of the best to come out this year period.
