I’m going to come right out and say it: “The Life and Times of the Magic Carpathians and Cerberus Shoal” is a very strange album.
There were signs of its surrealism from the start, like the name that was unpronounceable, the meager four tracks, and the introduction that gave greetings to men, women, and all the “sticky threats between.” However, nothing could have prepared me for how weird the album would really be.
The first track is a distorted spoken introduction by the members of the Magic Carpathians and Cerberus Shoal, dubbed over a landscape of ambient sound. They introduce the album as the fourth installment in a series by Northeast Indie and Cerberus Shoal.
As soon as the introduction ends, the track degenerates into a garbling of voices saying “this land is our land” over dissonant synthesized noises.
Out of the four selections the Magic Carpathians and Cerberus Shoal created, there is only one that I would venture to call music. “Continuumed” is a thirteen-minute song with a strange Middle Eastern flavor, mixing syncopated bass, percussion, and what sounds like a sitar.
The song starts slowly, without much beat, but when all the voices and instruments join in, it gains drive and becomes an infectious musical experiment. The track goes on for a long time, but there is so much variety, with different members of Shoal and the Carpathians lending their voices and trading instrumental riffs, that it never gets old.
But beyond that song and the introductory track, I found “The Life and Times” to be incomprehensible.
Maybe I just don’t get it.
Maybe it’s like Philip Glass’ minimalist operas that just sound like noise, or modern art that I think just looks like a bunch of dots, but the rest of the album didn’t sound like music to me. Not only could I not find any semblance of a beat in “Respoonsed” or “J.B.E.G.S.,” but most of the instruments they used weren’t even readily identifiable. There were hums, squeals, bubbling water, strange percussion, and even bagpipes thrown together in a way that may or may not have had some coherence at some time.
“Respoonsed” is a thirteen-minute venture into noise making, and there’s not a single trace of melody or even musicality. “J.B.E.G.S.” clocks in at half that time but doesn’t seem any shorter.
I know this is a joint venture between two groups of musicians who may not know how to meld their sounds, but I don’t think I should need a joint to understand it.
Trying something different in music is all a risk, and it’s a risk that the Magic Carpathians and Cerberus Shoal took wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, I can’t see why someone would buy “The Life and Times” to listen to one song and a bunch of what I can only construe as noise.
Maybe, just maybe, there’s a bar somewhere that’s running out of coasters.
Editor’s note: Cerberus Shoal will play live on WMPG’s Local Motives on Friday, March 19 at 7:30 p.m. Tune in to 90.9 FM in Gorham or 104.1 in Portland, or listen on the Internet at www.wmpg.org.
Jake Christie can be contacted at [email protected]