Last year's Garden Fly, Drip Eye single presented a different
Cerberus Shoal, featuring a new collection of musicians and a correspondingly changed sound. It was seemingly designed to simultaneously commemorate what was an intentionally temporary phase for the band, and to hold the group's fans over until this year's Mr. Dog Boy could be completed with Cerberus Shoal proper. Those who considered Garden Fly, Drip Eye a low point for the band (and I know there were several) should be relieved to hear that, as promised, it did not represent a permanent and exclusive new direction for the group. However, those same people may be discouraged to find that the Garden Fly, Drip Eye phase did leave its mark on their new material, and that Mr. Boy Dog is probably Cerberus Shoal's most eclectic, possibly even disjointed album to date.
Listening through this two disk set you'll hear elements of early 70's
prog, darkwave folk, drone, and (my favorite) acoustimath rock as well as the signature "throw a bunch of random instruments in a bag and shake briskly" sound you'll remember from Garden Fly, Drip Eye.
When I look at the little list of sonic generalizations I've just made, I think, "well, that actually sounds pretty good," and you might agree that all those things wrapped together might make a neat sound. The interesting thing is that a lot of the time those sounds are completely disjointed here. I think I could take several of the songs from this CD, copy them to another CD, and re-label them as "King Crimson," "Black Heart Procession," and "Bardo Pond" and any-but-the-most-finicky of those groups' fans would probably believe that I'd made a genuine mix tape of rarities. It's okay, though, because the songs that do sound a lot like other bands sound like pretty good songs from each of those bands. On the other hand, the songs or sections that sound most like Cerberus Shoal going out on a limb, being crazy, doing their own thing, are the ones that are mostly likely, at least for me, to fall flat.
You might also worry, as I did, that two CDs from a band that doesn't seem to know what direction it wants to go spells bloat. And it's true. There are many minutes of material here that probably should have been edited. There's a lot of stuff whose inclusion probably tickled the group on some conceptual level, but that I honestly can't imagine how any human would enjoy or benefit from listening to. The good news is that unlike most bands silly enough to release a double CD, these guys were bright enough not to spread the crap with completely uniform density. Disk number two is actually a very very good, concise album with a lot of dynamic character between the songs, very well structured with very few dead spots. Disk one you could practically just throw away. In fact, I might consider doing exactly that if it weren't for the really quite groovy (and very King Crimson-y (but with horns)) "Nataraja."
At least Cerberus Shoal does have an interest in trying new things, and not completely relegating themselves to just whatever you or I expect a pretentiously serious, mostly instrumental, post-rock, droney, psych band to sound like. There are times when the experiments are mechanical and musically pointless—so up front and uninspired that they might as well have just cut tape and inserted a voice-over that said, "Okay, this is where we played the exact same nine count banjo riff over and over again for about two minutes." But there are other times when everything they're intellectually trying to do, all the disparate influences—even all the posturing of regular American kids who wish they were smarter, cooler, and more artistic than they really are—all come together in a perfect, seamless, almost invisible way, and then the sound pulls you in and you're listening to real music for a change.
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