"toy world"
Year: 1981
Label: none
Format: cassette
Tracks: 13
Time: 42 min.
Genre: rock
"on land and in the sea"
Year: 1989
Country: UK
City: London
Format: CD, LP
Genre: rock, electronic
Style: Punk Avantgarde
Here’s something I’ve always appreciated about Cardiacs – they are as advertised. If you read about them you will encounter a number of sweeping and clichéd generalisations. "You either love them or you hate them"; well, their fans tend to think of them as the greatest band that ever existed, while their detractors have been known to pelt them with objects on stage. Like ’em or not, they provoke a strong reaction out of just about everybody. "They sound like [three of your favourite bands] thrown into a blender". In this case, we’ll say…Van der Graaf Generator, Frank Zappa, and Devo. Oh, but they really do – they’ve got the catchiness (and stiffness) of Devo down pat, with the over-the-top theatrics of VdGG and the reckless time-shifting of Zappa to boot. Despite bandleader Tim Smith’s insistence that it’s only pop, there really isn’t a genre to describe their music (another cliché: "they are a genre onto themselves"). What do we call them? Pronk? Zolo? Another made up word? "There’s enough ideas in one song to fill an entire album." Maybe that’s overshooting it, but what do we make of something like ‘Tarred And Feathered’ or ‘Duck And Roger The Horse’, these sub-four minute tunes which play like a Discman gone haywire? "The best-kept secret in music" – okay, this one isn’t true anymore. Several Cardiacs videos have a number of views that are into the six-figures, perhaps thanks to a legion of devoted fans who feel the need to tell everyone about them. "Check ’em out – they’re like Oingo Boingo, Genesis, and XTC… on acid!" Perhaps your first reaction would be, "you’re overselling them". But should such a band exist, would they not sound something like this?
Alas, things never quite came easy for them. Their first CD, A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window, didn’t come until 1988 – the band had been around for nearly a decade by that point. They’d released cassettes on their own, which were often marred by terrible sound quality – their first, The Obvious Identity, was simply dubbed onto as many spare tapes as they could scrounge up. The one cassette album that eventually did get a re-release (1984’s The Seaside) wound up missing several tracks as the original recordings were too far damaged. Keep in mind, this was in an era when art-rock bands were still getting record deals left and right. Perhaps Cardiacs flew their freak flag a little too high. Certainly Devo’s image was equally unsettling in their early days, but at least their songs tended to be catchy and easy to digest. For the Residents, the surrealness was their calling card – they were just actively weird and that’s why you liked them.
The difference is that those bands always felt like art projects; maybe Cardiacs were too, but you were never sure just how in on the joke they were, or even who the joke was on. They clearly didn’t mind being laughed at; their stage act and music videos often resembled something that laid between Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and The Three Stooges, and they spoke like philosophy majors that accidentally enrolled themselves in clown college. Their lyrics were cryptic and surreal, seemingly made up entirely of run-on sentences and non-sequiturs. They often made up elaborate backstories; most of the time they were clearly false, but surely they couldn’t always be so full of shit, could they? This resulted in their one brief moment of infamy, as the Sunday Sport latched on to a story that the married couple of Tim and Sarah Smith were actually brother and sister. Clearly false, but some did believe it – as anyone who comes into contact with Cardiacs knows, this is the sort of group you have to give a wide latitude to.
This, combined with the moderate success A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window, (and its riff-heavy single ‘Is This the Life?’, perhaps the most straightforward song the band ever did) allowed them to build up a bit of steam. On Land And In The Sea came only one year later, to mixed reviews. Well, everything they ever put out did. They were not exactly an easy band to drop among unsuspecting music journalists – AllMusic slapped it with 2 stars and referred to the album as a "whirligig of shattered atonal pop". You have to wonder if Zappa’s records wouldn’t have suffered the same fate had he not established himself in a time where artists were expected to be adventurous.
Still, AllMusic wasn’t exactly wrong. To a reviewer trying to knock out an impression of four or five albums a day, Cardiacs must be positively irritating. Their music is like a jagged rollercoaster; undeniably thrilling, but if this isn’t your thing, you’ll find yourself begging for some straighter track. Cardiacs are a band liable to change key, tempo, meter, time signature, even the entire genre at a moment’s notice; at first listen, opening tracks ‘Two Bites of Cherry’ and ‘Baby Heart Dirt’ seem to have entirely too many sections, cramming way too many notes into their three-and-a-half minute runtimes; other prog bands might take the entire side of an LP to get this many melodic ideas across. At the very least, you have to wonder what the sheet music would look like. Which is to say nothing of ‘Duck And Roger The Horse’; to continue the metaphor, this is where the rollercoaster gets so fast and turns so sharply that you may find yourself getting thrown off entirely (hitting the stop button and dashing off a quickly written, vaguely negative
Review ).
"the seaside"
Year: 1990
Label: TABC
Format: CD, LP
Tracks: 9
Time: 37 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Art Rock
