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Critic's Review
Charles Spano, All Music Guide
Chaiming the Knoblessone is, in a way, this experimental rock outfit's world album. Though don't expect anything remotely like glossy new age -- Cerberus Shoal takes influences from the Middle East, Africa, India (and maybe half a dozen other countries, not to mention planets) and builds a slithering, buzzing cacophony of avant-garde folk insanity. "Apatrides" starts simple enough (it's 14 minutes long, by the way) and eventually evolves into a kooky shout-along that falls somewhere between cLOUDDEAD's obtuse hip-hop poetry and some sort of cult revival. "Mrs. Shakespeare Torso" sounds like something :zoviet*france: might have done with cut-up found sound until it sounds like a Jim O'Rourke noise composition (off of say, I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1,2,3,4) but with ethereal female vocals. The "intermission," "A Paranoid Home Companion," is like an interrogation of Kubrick's HAL9000, literally on some bizarro-world version of Garrison Keillor's show. For all intensive purposes, this album sounds like absolute madness, but crazy or not, it's also an important entry into the new weird Americana free folk revolution of the 2000s.
