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.
