Sentient Village / Obsolescent Garden

Pittsburgh quartet Dendritic Arbor released one of the most confounding albums of 2015 with their Romantic Love debut. I know that saying “I don’t even know what genre this is, man” is a bit of a cliche at this point, but Love really did feel fresh. Imagine a mix of black metal, grindcore, and ambient, infused with Anaal Nathrakh’s electronic flourishes and The Dillinger Escape Plan’s zaniness. If that sounds terrible to you, I thought the same thing. That was, until I sampled Love for myself and found myself grinning at the batshit energy level and songwriting that seemed like the equivalent of assembling an Erector set on DMT.

It certainly intrigued me enough to check out their Sentient Village // Obsolescent Garden EP. As will probably be appreciated by Arbor fans, the four tracks on Village offer little stylistic departure from Love. Opener “Cotard Delusion” combines dissonant and blindingly fast guitars, skin-peeling screams, and impossibly quick drumming that goes through time signatures like Dave Mustaine goes through drummers. Second track “Failed Manifestation” continues the insanity with strings of notes that sound like the proggier parts of Krallice placed alongside stop-start riffs and even what sounds like a trumpet at one point.

While I’ve never been the biggest fan of music that’s “noise for the sake of noise,” there is something compelling about Arbor that remains even after the novelty wears off. Though the songs initially seem nonsensical, closer analysis reveals both occasional moments of clarity and a construction that implies more forethought was given to these arrangements than first supposed. Take “Keratoconus,” which moves from its jarring opening chords into a relaxed section of atonal, echoing clean notes, under which a drumbeat progressively grows quicker and quicker before culminating in blasting section that soon transforms into a crawling horror that evokes Ulcerate. The best moments, however, are in closer “Latex,” which employs malicious cyclical notes and steady thumping rhythms before exploding in a transcendent riff that sounds like something from the final Gridlink album.

Coupled with a surprisingly softer production than one might expect, the overall effect of Village is like being overrun by a swarm of hedgehogs. Despite the prickliness of the instrumentation, there’s always a fuzzy underbelly—in Village’s case, the ambient sections and flashes of discernible melody—to soften the harshness. And while I can’t hum any of these melodies from memory, the fact that I can still tell these chaotic songs apart is more than can be said for other noisy bands.

Despite the density of the material, Arbor’s riffcraft and songwriting are simply of high enough quality that listening never feels like a chore. Their seemingly warm reception in the blogosphere a few years back indicates that maybe there really was something special going on here. While the band have been quiet for a few years now, this EP offers a great companion piece for anyone who’s just discovered Love and is looking for more material in a similar vein.