Why is My Arm Not a Lilac Tree by Credentials
With an album title inspired by a Leonard Cohen novel, Credentials' Why is My Arm Not a Lilac Tree embodies the potential of experimental noise and first wave post-rock, delivering philosophically and politically polarizing themes within haunting, jarring compositions.
This album is the first full-length from Credentials, composed of Midwest music scene veterans, who released several demos back in 2019. You cannot help but hear valences of pandemic disorder in album-closer lyrics like “Purify and then collide/ There is no good, there is no good, there is only this.” Lead single “Body Builder’s Lament” serves as a taster for all the band has to offer stylistically. Sevan Arabajian-Lawson’s (Cat Riles) vocals create a hypnotic effect, if not an incantation in themselves, reminiscent of Kim Gordon’s monologue that opens Daydream Nation (1988). With that, and forgoing any attempt at expectable time signatures, the song will be cathartic for listeners appreciative of technically tight attempts at chaos.
Why is My Arm Not a Lilac Tree? comes to be experienced as a tightly knitted series of songs that make listeners reflect on questions of what it means to be human and what gods, dreams and myths we used to define ourselves and the primal urges we often resist. Such reflective experience is interspersed with bass lines and guitar riffs that make it feel as if someone is methodologically stabbing the air.
I imagine that Credentials live shows are something like the loud noise-math rock séance you didn’t know you needed.
