AN ONGOING DING

It's been a while since Cerberus Shoal announced that they would be releasing a new album, and after a long wait, it's finally out!

According the their blog, the music on this album was composed as a soundtrack/musical theatre performance for a venue called "The Stillhouse Theatre", which was performed there around the middle of 2003. The music is in some sense a detached extension/experimentation based on the track "Ding" from the Alvarius B split. After a 7 year lock-away, the music has been somewhat extended, re-recorded in the studio, and split up to form An Ongoing Ding.

People familiar with Cerberus Shoal will know that they have released soundtrack music before, in the form of Elements of Structure/Permanence. The difference between these two releases lies in the feeling of Elements being released just for the sake of a showcase/why not?, and An Ongoing Ding being released because the band felt it should be released properly, having faith in the compositions. A quick listen will show just how much the two releases actually differ.

An Ongoing Ding is, for better or worse, highly coherent and focused. This material was written around the same time as the Land We All Believe In music. Like Land, the music here shows the same "Proof of Evolution" quality that Land did. Long gone are the 8 minute aimless noodlings and extended instrumental explorations of their past, replaced by a somewhat sobering sense of musical vision.

Listening to this album, I can't help but get the feeling that this is the last Cerberus Shoal we're going to see for a long while, if not the last we'll ever see. While the music here is undoubtedly Shoals', I get the feeling that they treated this material, and its release, differently than their other albums. This music is highly produced, and packed with so much direction that it almost entirely lacks the 'breathing room' that made other releases so enjoyable. The pop-bound-progression seems to be even more evident here than on Land, resulting in a listenable and almost accessible experience that, despite being completely welcome and enjoyable, leaves me missing the old releases even more.

The music here is perhaps as close to the side-project Fire on Fire as it is to Cerberus Shoal, featuring extensive vocals and almost exclusively acoustic instrumentation. Further listening may prove me wrong, but I'm leaning towards classifying this as a 'lesser' Cerberus release, as I had Elements of Permanence. No one could say that the musical ideas here aren't fully developed, and wonderfully executed, but it strays a little too far from the vision of Shoal that I enjoyed so much, and leaves me thinking that this release may have lost something without it's on-stage presentation and one-time intimacy.

Any CS fan will probably agree that ANY release of new material is very much welcome and anticipated, but my advice here would be not to get your hopes up too high. Perhaps a hallmark of enjoying any CS release is to appreciate it more for what it is rather than what it accomplishes, and that guideline works especially well here. This album, despite being on the less-than-notable side of their discography, is very much in line with their evolution to date, and well worth a listen from any CS fan, although I doubt it will leave anyone inexperienced with their catalog a feeling that they "got it".

3 stars. This album is enjoyable, pleasant, and refreshing, even if it's not what I dreamt of a new CS chapter being, its far better than nothing.

So apparently the back-story of this record begins with the first of four 'split-side' CDs released by North East Indie Records between 2002 and 2004. Those CDs featured Cerberus Shoal in collaboration with various like-minded (and mostly lesser known) labelmates. The first of them, 'The Vim and Vigour of Alvarius B. and Cerberus Shoal' opens with a Karl Greenwald-inspired piece titled "Ding". The band was really at their creative peak at the time, as evidenced by the four split-sides as well as nearly simultaneous releases of two excellent full-length albums in 'Chaiming the Knoblessone' and 'Bastion of Itchy Peeves'. Their direction was quickly evolving though (as always), and following a brilliant career climax with the heavily acoustic 'The Land We All Believe In' in 2005 the band dissolved, with various members reappearing in either Big Blood, Fire on Fire or both a couple years later.

Somewhere in that period the group composed and performed an all-acoustic multidiscipline performance at the tiny Stillhouse Theatre in Portland, Maine that was attended by only about 50 fans but was apparently very well-received. This performance was intended as a sequel to 'Ding' (hence the title), and the band was so pleased with the result that they decided to rearrange the work as nine separate compositions and record it in a studio shortly before their demise. I'm not clear on the whole history of why there was a six year delay in releasing it, but here we are today with the recent Japanese release of 'An Ongoing Ding', the last hurrah of a legendary band that for most folks is only available as a digital download with little accompanying information and almost no fanfare.

Listening to this music feels a bit like coming across a loved one's intimate and personal journal while packing up their belongings after their untimely death. The vibe is bittersweet; while the unexpected find and connection are nostalgic and poignant, some of the memories evoked can be hard to bear.

Maybe that's a bit heavy for just an album, but I suspect most Cerberus Shoal fans have developed strong feelings for the band and their music over the years, and also have many fond memories for which their songs provided a pleasant backdrop. I know that's true for me at least, and this analogy occurred to me while listening to the closing track "Me No No Show You There" so I'll go with it here.

The sound here is very much in the vein of 'Bastion of Itchy Peeves', avant-indie music full of disjointed vocals and odd instrumentation including nondescript woodwinds and horns as well as something plucked that I'm not sure of but is likely either a banjo, oud or possibly just an alternately-tuned guitar. The album kicks off with the brief "A Tailor of Graves" which sounds like a 'Bastion' outtake, followed by another of Chriss Sutherland's somewhat annoying spoken-word vignettes "Shall We Give the Earth a Word?" which as usual includes some interesting drone and sound experimentation musically but makes almost no sense lyrically. Really though one has to expect that from any of the latter Cerberus Shoal albums, and I suppose I'd have been surprised had there not been at least one of these sort of tracks. That one is followed by "I've Nothing Left", an eight minute- long, quintessential Shoal composition on which just about everyone harmonizes in a disorderly fashion amidst pan flutes, jangling strings and a laconic rhythm. This is exactly the sort of song that attracted me to the band and kept my attention even as they wandered experimentally all across the musical landscape during the dozen years or so of their existence.

The next couple of tracks are musically adventurous but feature a bit too much of Sutherland's weird vocals for my taste, although again that's all part of the Shoal package so you take the good with the could-be-better. If you've ever wondered what a Cerberus Shoal club-mix would sound like you should check out "Lashing at our Backs" though. Very amusing.

One has to wonder if the band knew their end was fast-approaching when they recorded these tracks, especially the final two. "O! Holy Fledgling" is a sort of oddly bastardized and organ-led hymnal that segues beautifully into the closing "Me No No Show You There", which is one of the most gorgeous, melodic and grounded compositions I've ever heard from this band. For all their experimental misses over the years, the band proves here that they never lost the ability to nail a solid performance when they set their minds to it.

In some ways I'm saddened to hear this album as it once again reminds me that we've lost a band that (for me at least) was musically a big part of the past decade. I'm also still waiting for a follow-up to the brilliant Fire on Fire debut, so maybe in that respect this belated farewell from Cerberus Shoal can act as a proxy until that happens. Four out of five stars despite the sometimes overdone spoken-word passages. Essential for fans of the band and very highly recommended to everyone else.

peace