Dendrites – 'Grow': Southern Groove Metal from Volos!
Dendrites present us with 'Grow', an album with tremendous power and excellent sound! Get ready for Southern Groove Metal from Volos!
By Dimitris (Bari) Polyzois
Volos and the wider region of Thessaly in general may not have endless swamps and humidity clinging to your every pore, but it now has its own representatives of the Southern Groove Metal/Stoner Rock scene. The Dendrites serve the above musical idiom faithfully and creatively, adding themselves to a list of important bands for the domestic scene such as Potergeist and Planet of Zeus…. The band from Volos presents us with 'Grow', a record bearing the signature of Ikaros Records (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter).
Grow, or as we say "the wolf may have grown old…"
The Grow is the band's second record, released in the summer of 2019, following their self-titled debut which came out three years earlier. In the case of Grow, we're dealing with an album that compositionally serves all of the band's personal musical influences, embraces some pent-up urges, and gives us a record full of powerful moments!
Music for Bourbon Whiskey….
The album kicks off with a bang with the super groovy Get the Fuck, a Groove Metal anthem with guitars that call to mind the late Dimebag Darrell and the thunderous legacy of Pantera.
What follows is equally powerful with tracks like Bullet Dodger, Dreamhouse Pt.2, One Hell of a Ride and River, written straight out of the swamp of the Greek southern stoner scene. Songs made for hard headbanging and live-show mayhem!
On the record you'll also find more melodic moments such as Throwing Rocks and Dreamhouse Pt.1, while on I'm Gonna Fly we get the record's bluesiest moment, featuring saxophone.
Finally, Snake Oil Merchant must have been written on a North Carolina porch while watching reptiles slither through the swamp reeds (picture it…), right where Pepper Keenan wrote some of the most magical riffs for the beloved Corrosion Of Conformity.
And suddenly we found ourselves in Seattle!
My personal favorite moment, I'd say, is the Grunge -flavored track Leave Me Behind. The song surprised me with its 90s Seattle scene vibe, following in the footsteps of one of the scene's most important bands, Alice In Chains. A tremendous composition and performance with dual vocal lines that I'd have expected the one and only Jerry Cantrell to have written to sing together with the legendary Layne Staley! Even the solo calls to mind Cantrell's compositional genius.
The production is also powerful and very tight, done in part by Thanasis Timplalexis and Dendrites at Red Goat Studios in Volos and completed by Steve Lado, while the mixing was done by Psychon Nyne and SoundAbuse Productions in Athens.
I can't wait to see them at some point, for the first time, live, to see how they pull off such a powerful and demanding record.
In conclusion
The Dendrites with their second record don't lay claim to any laurels of originality or uniqueness, but what they present is a hard, electric, and tight album, a tribute to the heavy American South and the Groove Metal scene it spawned. And sometimes to the American North too….
Rate: 8/10
Tracklist
- Get the Fuck
- Bullet Dodger
- Throwing Rocks
- Dreamhouse Pt.1
- Dreamhouse Pt.2
- Leave Me Behind
- One Hell of a Ride
- River
- Snake Oil Merchant
- I'm Gonna Fly
