A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: “Pilf” by Cardiacs – who, I must once again stress, are the best band in the world – from their early cassette-only release The Obvious Identity. “Pilf” is an unusual song in a fathomlessly weird catalog, largely because it has a pitch-perfect late-70s power pop song – complete with a swaggering hard-rock guitar solo – dropped into the middle of another, much more typical (of Cardiacs, at least) prog-punk song that alternates between 4/4 verses and 7/8 bridges and sounds vaguely like the Buzzcocks. Cardiacs songs rarely finish anywhere near where they start, with the various bits strung together with a logic that owes more to dreams than traditional songwriting. I think that’s one of the keys to understanding the band’s hallucinatory intensity: they’re completely unafraid to violate traditional notions of structure in order to keep songs interesting, and they have the instrumental chops to make pretty much anything and everything work.

If downloading dodgy rips of even dodgier cassette-only releases from 28 years ago is not your thing, and you live in England, where there is some remote hope you might find Cardiacs records in stores, there is a flawless live version of this track, along with almost the entirety of the early Cardiacs catalog, on the two Special Garage Concerts CDs. There are maybe 3 not-so-great songs out of 32, and the rest are the sort of brilliant, convoluted pop genius that gets stuck in your head for weeks on end.

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.