A Year of Music

Cardiacs are one of the best things ever. Back in 2006, I seriously considered making a weekend visit to London to see them play one of their legendary live shows at the Astoria, and only didn’t go because London is 8 time zones away from San Francisco, last-minute plane tickets would have been hideously expensive, and the shows sold out in like a day anyway. They are the greatest. For real. Unless you hate things that are fun, or never liked The Pixies or King Crimson or Queen or Sparks or any of a million other weird bands that are also fun. They are OBJECTIVELY GOOD.

So it is with considerable delight that I point out that Mutant Sounds has posted a rip of their nearly impossible to find debut cassette, The Obvious Identity. Some of this material was released on the (almost as hard to find) Archive compilation from five or six years ago, but it’s different when it’s all in its original setting. These songs sound a billion times more primitive than the refined mayhem found on Guns and Sing to God, but they do have their own weird allure, falling somewhere between Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Oingo Boingo and Madness.

I could spend all night writing about how great these guys are, but instead download the rip, listen to the free downloads on the Alphabet Business Concern’s pages for Cardiacs, and then engage in the not-at-all torturous process of trying to convince Tim Smith to sell you his music. He and his band deserve your money, but he sure doesn’t make it easy for people to give it to him.