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.

Stuck in my head this morning: “Psychic Squirt” by Severed Heads, from their recent album Under Gail Succubus, mostly because of the way it bastardizes the lyrics to a Carpenters song:

MVRemix: On the track, ‘Psychic Squirt’, you use lyrics from an older song. What was this all about?

Tom Ellard: It’s a bit of ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ by Burt Bacharach. Listen to the original by The Carpenters and then, look at the city now. See how it changed, like a mutant growth. The track sings about mutant growths. Everything around the world now seems to be a mutation that has grown too big like the props from ‘Lost In Space’. The world is over ripe.

I had a hell of a time figuring out which of the nearly innumerable Severed Heads releases the song was on, having only the lyrics to go on, and when I was trying to narrow it down, I realized that my blithe assumption that Severed Heads’ music has settled down in the band’s old age was tragically, deeply wrong. They’re still at least as weird as the Residents, they just seem more normal at first because they use more recognizable samples and slicker-sounding instruments.

I find it remarkable that few (if any) reviews have highlighted the fact that PJ Harvey's newest album is basically a concept piece about abortion and desolation. Does nobody listen to the words anymore?

It's a beautiful and strange record, seeming like nothing so much as an album-length exploration of a single obscure piece of Harvey's very broad range. And its subject matter is both strong and not very veiled. It's a brave piece of work, and evidence that Harvey still hasn't stopped growing, as much as disappointments like Uh Huh Her might have indicated otherwise.