Album Review: Cerberus Shoal - Cerberus Shoal

Clipping and grafting the etching of an idea pilfered from a book of poetry written by Brown University students in 1893, Cerberus Shoal breached in Boston in 1994, before spawning up to Portland, Maine, to experiment on their ash-grey, half-pickled offspring in inky green hatchery jars. While hanging up their snaring tools in 2005, Cerberus Shoal invaerted and reemerged through a plethora of homely yet exquisite and adventurous phases over the course of their career, lumbering up from the fleshy bluffs of the human ear in the guise of a whisper-calm post-hardcore band before floridly unfurling into a powdered bone-dusted and warmly abstract folk band. Their precocious accession in planting a flag on the far shore of second-wave emo's sweetly caustic and bitterly gladsome Slint-mixed colluvium rim is still their most endearing work to these hairy old ears, though, and it's what I want people to hear most dearly from their revived catalog. The band's long out-of-print self-titled debut, recorded in 1994 and released in 1995 on Stella White records, and lovingly resuscitated by the applied sonic residency skills of Temporary Residence Ltd. (circa. 2018), documents the band's precocious beginnings and acts as an initial schematic whose architectures would be redlined, revised, and addendumed on later releases as the group increased the quotient of raw granola and thorium granules in their increasingly crunchy, amalgamed sound. In these early days, though, Cerberus Shoal embodied the marriage of rhythmically dislocated chord progressions characteristic of many Dischord Records signees and the progressive push, patient dynamics, and suppressed convulsions of slowcore dreamweavers ala Codeine, a fragily distilled formula which only occasionally tips its hand to spill into less equable fits of screamo-induced sensory disarray.

Out on Temporary Residence Ltd... I might have mentioned that already.

Album Review: Boko Yout - Gusto

Anytime I'm in a new town, I engage in various habits that are against my preferences towards longevity- one of which is picking up half a dozen donuts from one or more proprietors of such insulin-shock-inducing confections. Something I've noticed at many of the dens of these hip, sweet-salt-dealing devils is the prevalence of pink-frosted rings adorned with sprinkles on offer... something which leads me to wonder about the enduring influence of the Odd Future Collective. Sure, you could assume that these peony-painted threats to my gut health are downstream from the prolonged curse of Millennial arrested development and their senile Simpsons-mania, and nothing else, but I think you'd be wrong to jump to such conclusions. Who made such an iconic pastry cool after all? Not Al Jean, that's for sure. The Simpsons essentially became roundly and deservedly reviled under his stewardship. No, being reminded of Homer's indiscriminate sugar intake and the flailing legacy of a once celebrated sitcom is more likely to spoil one's appetite as we reflect on our own failures than to compel a joyous purchase. No, it's rather the opposite. The irony of adopting something completely uncool and popularly derided as a floating symbol of antagonism that I think makes the pink donut ironically VERY cool when ornamentally assumed by Tyler & Co., and which keeps it in the forefront of the cultural purview- an anti-symbol symbol, if you will- something that can be anything but is always an assertion of the self, even when declared in the negative... as well as a totem of one's (read: MY) future struggles with diabetes. Where else might you find Odd Future's resonance intervening remarkably out of the blue? Well, to answer this, you need to look no further than the Swedish band Boko Yout, whose album Gusto dropped late last year. For lead singer and creative keystone, Paul Adamah, the deranged reflection of late '00s LA as the site of a persecutory cataclysm and an endless moshpit on the rim of the abyss- which Odd Future divined- had the effect of cracking the carapace of his incarcerated figuration, eventually leading to the summoning of Dr. Gusto, a lwa-like presence that rises through the cracks in sidewalks, scurries up light poles, and tumbles northward, scaling pantlegs like a hairy spider up a sweating downspout intending to ride a cheval worthy of his emphatic tutelage. You can hear the incantation of drums beckoning Dr. Gusto to take the reins on the track "Shift," before the full force of his charisma seizes you in the bracing, rubber-skulled bounce and scrape of epi-biological recall on the preceding track that bears his name. Now smoldering, Blue Velvet-crushed-and-coated hip-hop is likely not the first impression that one would take away from Boko Yout's sound, as the group's hook-heavy and expressively groovy rock pedigree more immediately invokes the icy and cutting, yet fresh-faced and energetic '00s-ish British garage and indie revivals, splashing in the same youthful fountains as Bromheads Jacket and Maxïmo Park without sacrificing either sincerity or inborn inclinations towards spectacle—a playful kind of seriousness that resolves through sober internal inquisition into the phenomenon of the self and the fosterage of one's heritage, straining through this focus as if through an aspheric lens to uncover a sonic arterial lane that conjoins chaotic funk with slippery post-punk, and diasporic disco with confidently anti-fashion folk, making the wraparound rollicking and catchy call-up "Ignored," the wiry, gold-bug-busting and crypto-clay-soled manic clap of "9-2-5," and the motorik rev and waterslide-like groove of the courageously catchy "Imagine" come alive in a form that is both scientifically anomalous and yet ordained as inevitable by some dark sorcery accessible only through an oily globe that rotates like a molten core deep in the center of Paul Adamah's skull. What doesn't kill you makes you odder, and only the odd survive, so long as they have the appetite to chew through the chains that hold them back.

 

Hoop springs (digs) eternal (Hoopdiggas Recordings)

Album Review: El Sexteto Tabala - Reyes del Son Palenquero

I promised that I would cover more African and South American acts in 2026 when I wrote my 2025 Inventational, and if you thought I was simply blowing smoke and all manner of noxious fury, then you'd better sit yourself down and get ready to house a full buffet of smoked crow. Today, I am introducing you to Sexteto Tabalá, a Colombian folk group whose African ancestry and diasporic connections are so tightly wound around their sound that such lineages and histories are synonymous with themselves in the same way a cat identifies with its own striped coat. Sexteto Tabalá boasts of playing the ONLY true form of Colombian music,* in that it is free from guitars and electric instruments, in addition to pulling from the rich and dearly specific past of their nation's heritage and their familial ties to rebellious maroons, and deploying only instruments that were available to sugarcane workers in centuries past; notably amongst them the marímbula, a plucked box instrument, inspired by African percussion tools, but which owes its origins to Cuba. Further, the sound of Sexteto Tabalá is largely credited to the influence of Cuban engineers hired to supervise the sugarcane industry in the early 20th century in an area of Colombia which had been granted its autonomy by the Spanish Crown since 1713, San Basilio de Palenque. In their off hours, these Cubans would play son montuno songs and teach them to the agricultural workers of the area, most of whom were still descendants of runaway slaves. Over time, these once Cuban sounds would acquire their own distinct character as they were adopted by the Palenque people and transformed into the particular hybrid of African diasporic sound and Caribbean proto-salsa known as son Palenquero, a style that invoked its practitioners' Angolan, Central, and East African roots, sung in a unique dialect Creole derived from Bantu, while remaining independent, flexible, and conspicuously unadorned with the extraneous din of modernity. Sexteto Tabalá hold themselves out as continuing the traditions of the style's best-recognized purveyors like Sexteto Habanero, while taking care to respectfully innovate on traditional workingman's songs when inspiration strikes with indisputable serendipity. Their LP Reyes del Son Palenquero was recorded in San Basilio de Palenque but reissued by the Bogotá-based Palenque Records in 2016. Rhythmic inspiration that proudly carries the wealth of centuries of history and the debts owed to generations of pastoral workers, a burden as weighty as a mountain, which they hold aloft as if it were as light as a feather.

Palenque Records, where history comes alive!

* I have no way of verifying this, and I'm not saying that I condone such an assessment, however, it is what they say about themselves, which for a band from such a culturally rich and musically inclined country as Colombia, these are really fighting words, and the unnecessarily antagonistic character of their self-assessment genuinely amuses me. Like, why do you have to be so savage, bro? Damn!

Album Review: Bucle Lunar - ¿Qué pasó en Medellín?

Moon gazing has been an enthralling pastime for much of human history. For instance, the names of the various phases of the moon in Japanese correspond with the suggested activity observers should engage in while waiting for the celestial queen to make her debut each evening. The moon that rises on the 17th, for instance, is known as "tachimachizuki," which means that you can stand and witness the moon on that night's ascent without fear of taxing your weary legs, while "fukemachizuki," the name for the moon that rises on the 20th, suggests that you're better off catching a few winks before Tsukuyomi's lantern lights up the sky. In South America, there are some who say that witnessing a lunar eclipse can leave beauty marks on the face of one's future children—a sort of permanent reminder of the lunar guardian's blessing and distant stewardship of the people below, even when it itself is subsumed by the dark, or cast out by the light of day. You might not always see the moon, but you can still witness its gifts each morning when you gaze in the mirror. Reminders of an absence are painful, but unavoidable in life. Sometimes the only relief from anguish is song. "Cry Moon" by Venezuela's Bucle Lunar gives voice to this amiable sort of lament, with plush melodies and pale loops of powdery tranquil groove. Waiting and pining for the return to some truant felicity or tranquil degree of composure appears to be a recurring theme on their debut album ¿Qué pasó en Medellín?, of which "Cry Moon" is only one of its many splendid shades of luminance. The steady thumping progression and subtle electricity of the lush dream-pop pulse of "Tachycardia, thump thump" and the affable push of "Me muevo" prove capable of dislocating one from the entropy of their angst, while the slow embrace of the languidly expectant swirl of "Atemporal" and the persistent undertow of enticement and tenacity of "Terca" resist any reversion into despair. Sympathies filter in from abroad to gracefully envelop one's ears on the motorik psyched-out-mirage and cumbia-infused flow of "La kumbia," as well as the whimsically consecrated closer "Miranda en Belén," a track that is soaked in tears, whether they are of joy or deep sorrow, which may be an oscillating facet of speculation. Like the eternal circuit of the moon's perambulation around our sphere, there is no true end to the state of things, only phases and new beginnings; nights are long but not bereft of solace, and any absence felt is only a yearning yet to be fulfilled.

Ain't no cure for Summerblue Records. 

Album Review: 1349 - Massive Cauldron of Chaos

Like most people who claim the ignoble mantle and nerd de plume of audiophile, I'm still catching up on releases from 2025 (formerly the dumbest year on record, a record that was subsequently surpassed by the first week of 2026). Of the things that I'm glad that I've scooped out of the eye of the abyss is 1349's live record Winter Mass. Recorded around the time that the lockdowns were lifted in (presumably) Oslo (or some other godless, frigid plateau), this live record is a raw but vital procession of ugly and void-gouging sound that demonstrates pertinently just why the band has been able to maintain an audience for close to three decades on this cursed ball of dirt we call a planet. Unavoidably (at least for me), hearing Winter Mass has made me nostalgic for the album that introduced me to the band in the first place, 2014's Massive Cauldron of Chaos. It's not, as far as I know, considered one of their better albums, but it's also not one of their worst- it just tends to be the one that I think about most whenever I'm reminded of 1349... which is any time the subject of medieval diseases comes up (which in my life is more than you'd think for someone who is neither a physician nor a historian, but who does watch an awful lot of Apothecary Diaries). Named for the year that the black plague finally overtook Norway, 1349's most obvious references stylewise are groups like Mayhem and early Satyricon, although there are instances of Kreator-esque thrash riffage, most notable on the clamoring gnaw of gothic angst “Slaves,” the second song off the album I'm presently examining. In general, MCoC is a return to the band’s coldly masterful, blood-nourished roots. The previous decade was one of experimentation for the group, releasing boundary-pushing albums Revelations of the Black Flame in 2009 and Demonoir in 2010, both of which were received with hyperbolic consternation by corpse-painters who prefer to keep things fast and nasty. This superfluous ire was mostly quelled by MCoC’s return to form though, with Ravn’s raspy forked-tongue vocals, Archaon’s peeling shred torrents, and the super-human speed of drummer Frost’s legendary percussion laying waste to the expectations of their audience, and further treating them to a dip in a bubbling lake of acid swirling with a crimson foam of vicera-churned froth on “Cauldron,” rending them like a rag doll in a tug of war between two competing zombified pit bulls on “Exorcism,” disfiguring them beyond recognition on the bruisingly unshackled melee of “Chained,” and then mercilessly desecrating their remains on the groovy gang press of “Postmortem.” 1349 would indulge in more abstract forms of expression on subsequent releases, 2019's The Infernal Pathway and 2024's The Wolf & the King, but the stewing malignance of MCoC was undoubtedly the odious succor needed to  breathe fresh hellfire into the group, rallying them to carry their campaign of darkness into the 21st Century.

Bringer of a long dusk of discord (Season of Mist).

Interview: Post-Trash + 2025 Recap

You get through your first full week of 2026? Good! Glad the year hasn't killed you yet (not for a lack of trying, I'm sure). Before you finally kiss 2025 goodbye and drop it in the dustbin of history, take a look back with Dan and Pat of Post-Trash and myself as we chat about some of our favorite albums of the past year. 

If you don't already know, Post-Trash is an incredible resource for underground and alternative music coverage with a flexible coverage philosophy and a genuine openness to fresh critical voices. I used to contribute to Post-Trash back when I was just starting my illustrious music writing career (pause for applause/laughter/rain of rotten vegetables), and I'm forever thankful for Dan being willing to give a hopeless weirdo like me a chance to air out his errant opinions. 

Listen to the conversation here:

Albums covered in this episode (in order of appearance): 

Grace Rogers - Mad Dogs

Nyxy Nyx - Cult Classics Vol. I

Hiver & Jason Koth - Offers

Danny Brown - Stardust

Prewn - System

Wombo - Danger in Fives

Militarie Gun - God Save The Gun

Hedonist - Scapulimancy

Album Review: TrndyTrndy - Virtua

About a decade and a half ago, Vektroid raised it as a beacon and magnet for recognition of the existential ennui gripping those carried out to sea in the first wave of America's lost decade (still ongoing) in the wake of a major financial crash, and then Fire-Toolz optimized it to supercharge her caustic, rainbow-stained death spiral, leading to a badly realized and spotty cottage industry of extreme metal and punk bands trying to sound like the prime reference for their riffs were modernist watercolor prints found on the walls of dental offices nationwide (imitation is flattery, but it's also facile), and now it comes to this... all the hip, audacious, and circuitous routes have been trodden to the point that they have carved bleak, cavernous trenches and lightless, fallow gouges of no-man's-land into the culture; yet, it remains! So what to do with it? The only remaining ingress to the bounty of this small, fertile pasture is to step over the gate and waltz in like Big Chungus Bugs Bunny waddling into a vegan bakery with a hankering for a slice of cruelty-free carrot cake. The only thing in stock, though, is jazz- sweet, blithesome, impossibly pearlescent new-age fusion jazz, that's it! As the stars would have it, the kind of jazz that Rochester's TrndyTrndy curates and composes on Virtua was always the Fiddler's Green you pined to chart-wheel, thrown barefooted in your less guarded and honest moments of reflection- a plateau of fountainous mirth and charismatic intrigue, where knowledge is abundant and the future is as wide open as the horizon at dawn. TrndyTrndy is able to be the architect of this sonic encarta of bright, flawless forms, malleable flesh-marble, and dazzlingly synthesized auditory-tactile synesthesia despite being in their early twenties, and therefore likely never directly experiencing the era of Eyewitness CD-ROM guided tours of natural phenomena and archaeological investigations which serve as the aesthetic womb and inspiration for the project. They've dauntlessly condensed, extracted, and purified its primary essence, meaning that through the internet, all time is flat and abstract. You are 12, you've just hopped off the bus and are returning from school, your parents aren't home so you blow off your assigned school work and boot up the family computer, run a DOS executable from a digital encyclopedia, and spend the next two hours exploring a Smithsonian-sized archive of facts and photos about large jungle cats. You are 78, the young woman who brings you your pills in the afternoon has a playlist streaming on her phone and it is feeding music into the wireless headset in her ears, you accept the paper cup she hands you when she stops at your room, you pause and examine the contents of the cup, "Do I get the red pill today?" you inquire, she takes one of the earbuds of the headset out of her ear and asks you to repeat your question, the music pulsing out of the soft nub of the headphone is loud enough that you can hear it ring through the doorway without adjusting your cochlear implant, the sounds are sweet and comforting, familiar even, your memory is jogged but the recollection is so buried and long-forgotten you doubt its veracity as it has the clingy fuzziness of a hallucination... something... something about tigers? These worlds coexist, yours and everyone else's timelines have folded, and Virtua is the seam of the hinge where time and space collapse on their premises. It's all coming back to you now, isn't it?