Cardiacs album poll

A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window

i like all their stuff i've heard but this is no contest, that record slays me

oh, good lord. the STG poll was tough enough.

Maybe could've ignored the four live albums (you missed out Cardiacs Live here but I guess that no-one would've voted for it anyway) and ditched Archive which is mostly tracks from the first two. That would've neatly left the ten studio albums (Songs For Ships and Irons debatable but whatever). Then you could poll the extraneous albums - the live stuff, Sea Nymphs, Tim Smith's solo album, Spratley Japs, Mr & Mrs Smith - that are practically as much "Cardiacs" albums some of these ones.

Also, a rant: The "This band sucks" option bugs me. I'm turned off by the the huge amount of negative shit posted on ILM these days. Yeah yeah, it was ever thus. But after not coming here for quite a long time I'm pretty surprised there are so many "________ were appalling"/worst band polls/"here's another band from the 90s that sucked"/"worst song on ______ album/which of these albums is the worst" threads. Are people insecure about their musical tastes that they can only post unchallenging opinions about presumably boring bands they claim to dislike? Or do they just want to shoot the shit but have run out of good stuff to talk about? Then please fuck off to ILX and talk about putting the toilet seat down or how do you butter your toast or something.

Maybe it's supposed to reflect the meme that Cardiacs were confounded by being a hated band/banned from the NME/John Peel doesn't like them etc. That apologetic position is presumably contrived to explain to a nonbeliever why one of the most compelling and exciting bands of their time are largely unknown. But it's completely irrelevant now. I've no idea if it ever was relevant or even true. Lots of band I liked in the 80s and 90s were were ignored by the music press/BBC Radio etc. Has anyone ever claimed the Bachelor Pad's career was stymied by the failure of Peel and the NME editors to recognise their brilliance? It used to annoy me that a major underground figure like JG Thirwell used to get like one interview every four years and maybe an album review if he was lucky. Not because his career was at stake or that a NME cover was proof of his brilliance, but because as a rabid fan in the pre-internet days information about such characters was unbelievably scarce. Meanwhile, other bands I enjoyed got tons of coverage, numerous Peel sessions and played all the major festivals. eg. Loop. It didn't do their career much good.

Anyway....rant over. There's tons of contenders here. The ones I've listened to the most in the last couple of years have been the Garage Concerts (which I think is phenomenal), Guns and Heaven Born and Ever Bright. That's possible because the others are too familiar to play too often. But I truly think the best thing they ever did is On Land And On The Sea. It's starts rough - Two Bites of Cherry is not a good opener. Then Baby Heart Dirt is probably the weakest song on the album, god knows how it became the single. But it gets in it's stride by track 3 and then keeps piling on right until the end. The Ever So Closely Guarded Line is my favourite Cardiacs epic.

nonbeliever

This kind of thing is what irks me about Cardiacs fans.
Anyway, Songs For Ships And Irons just edges out A Little Man And A House for me, but only just. I could never get along with them after the Smith / Smith / Smith / Quy / Luckman / Drake line-up fell apart tbh.

I'm with you. I should've said "so-called non-believer".

On Land And In The Sea.

CONFESSION TIME : I saw them supporting Marillion when I was 16, hated them but loved Marillion. The shame.

Well you kind of have to include at least "Mare's Nest" (which is more or less THE live album) and "Garage Concerts", since the material on there isn't really available otherwise in good sound quality and the performances are so much better than they were on the tapes. I can't see anyone voting for "Archive" either but Cardiacs fans are a weird bunch. The reason I added the "this band sucks" button is because you do see some people who react very negatively whenever this band is mentioned, I don't really know why but at least you can give them something to vote for. More just curious to see how many people will vote that. Would be awesome if it won the poll.

I'm surprised Peel didn't like the band; he likes everything, especially if it's unusual.

I admire the tenacity of the average Cardiacs fan, but the SECOND you start referring to Tim as Timmy you are dead to me sucka.

xp I never understood all the hate on that Marillion tour, I hate to say it but their fans have to be the worst if they can't appreciate a show like that as an opening act

xxp i don't think liking fish-era marillion is that embarrassing, is it? or at least not as much as their 90s to present stuff (which i certainly don't know anything about, no sir, not me)

Peel was often oddly prudish (remember the moritorium on Beaver Patrol?), maybe the Sunday Sport incest scandal turned him off.

Marillion fans fucking suck

god I love the Marc Riley radio session from 2008, during the last part of "Gibber and Twitch":

"Try to relax but then again oh no...something...isn't it good brbrbrbrbrbrbr ahhhhh FUCK!!! Sorry..."

I saw that Marillion tour too. That was my first ever big concert, apart from local bands at the community centre. We arrived as Marillion were on their first number so I missed Cardiacs and didn't discover them for another couple of years.

Re Peel. He'd had Gentle Giant in 7 times. Maybe he thought he'd heard enough of that kind of thing. As for Beaver Patrol, he probably was familiar with the original and the PWEI version fucking sucks the life out of it.

If I had to listen, I'd choose the Hogarth era nowadays, the sixth form verbiage and 'my burd just left me' stinks up the room.

As a postscript (har) 'Marbles' is a total LJ catnip alert sleeper hit, he just doesn't know it yet.

Marillion's first uk tour date in Newcastle had Peter Hammill as support, and he got a bit of a hard time from the audience during his set then, which is fucking daft, huh.

I think "this sucks" is a valid opinion, some stuff I do think sucks, and I wish people would put "this band/album sucks" as an option in more polls. I like the Cardiacs though, I voted for "On Land and in the Sea", although I don't really have a pref out of a bunch of them TBH.

On Land And In The Sea edges out Spirit Of Eden and Pornography as my album of the 80s, but I don't think it edges out Sing To God. Would have possibly voted Pony if it was here though. Guns will be the unlucky one.

I'd been personally waiting until 'LSD' before starting this thread but it's becoming increasingly apparent that barring a miracle we won't be hearing it.

have we heard anything about whether or not it may actually come out though?? I don't know how bad Tim is but can't they just finish it in a year or two?

Now the band have gone public with it, it's ok I guess to say that Tim probably won't be able to sing again, so unless someone else finishes it off it won't be seeing the light of day.

Tim cannot communicate effectively at the moment, never mind sing, LSD has no recorded vocals, sadly it's not in the ballpark.

'Marbles' LJ

Not unless Damon Albarn does the vocals instead

THE HORROR

Ooooooooll give me tweny wahn, tweny wahn...

Stick it out without vocals as part of a box including the Garage Concert Rehearsal DVD, radio sessions and other unreleased stuff. I understand they've got more than a few live shows that were well recorded.

Well the covers record made a decent amount of money directly for Tim's care, so if somebody is willing to put the work in I guess they could release more material.

Will be on Marbles...Kavus + female harmony singers could do the vocals (at Tim's behest) but it's more a case of the record needing his mastery of mixing + steady hand at the reins.

Maybe it's not all so bad, there was a fairly grim piece in the Guardian that kind of implied that Tim was in really bad shape, but I found Kavus' response which gives me some hope:

To be honest I was a little surprised by The Guardian piece. Bic had done the interview about a month before and the writer Ian Gittins' father had had a stroke so he was apparently very sensitive to the issue. When I read it there we're quotes in there from Bic that did not sound like him at all ('He's a great guy'...Bic never talks like that). When I spoke to Bic he was furious, apparently he had said very little of what he had been quoted as saying. Ho hum.

Yes, it does paint a rather bleak picture. Tim is not paralysed, nor can he do little else than 'be hoisted in and out of a wheelchair' (sorry if this is a little inaccurate, I'm quoting from memory here) however a lot of what was written is true and a lot more realistic than some of the missives and speculations that have been come out.

I have been fairly tight lipped about the situation, as have all Tim's friends, but if I'm honest one good thing about an article like this is does clear up to some extent what a lot of people have feared and the amount of fairly inane, although mostly genuinely well meaning, emails I've been bombarded with over the last couple of years from fans has slowed down a little.

You know; 'Hey are you and Tim Jamming again' and 'Why don't you put out Maresnest on DVD' or 'Are you working on finishing the new album again' etc. I've just found the whole thing extremely painful as you can imagine.

Also the sales of Leader Of The Starry Skies went right up after the feature.

We would love to make the entire back catalogue available again and are well aware everyone wants this and also the ridiculousness of a situation where interest in Tim's music is at an all time high, there is a big demand for it AND it will raise a lot of money

All I can say here is that it is proving EXTREMELY difficult right now. I can't go into the details unfortunately. We are doing our best to sort this out.

To re-affirm though. Tim is still the wonderful Tim in himself. He is still extremely funny and perceptive and as full of shit as he always was. He listens to music continually (including a lot of his own stuff) and enjoys regular visits from his pals. He just can't really do or say much right now but the money raised by this album is already going into more help for him.

He has good days and bad days as you might expect but is incredibly positive in his outlook....giving all of us around him hope.

aw nice :)

Yeah, I guess it's easy for fans of the band to get a bit entitled about new material, remastered stuff etc but there's really so much on his plate right now that we ought to be happy with what we have already.

the thing is that Cardiacs are kind of like a religion when it comes to fandom, it's not like we're missing the next Pet Shop Boys album, we're talking about something that comes wind up at the greatest album of all time in the eyes of a fan

careful now, Yes got mad plaudits on ILM

A Little Man and a House and the Whole World Window

I like that there are a few ILM posters who have a Cardiacs album or two in their faves pile, which reminds me...where are you Alex In NYC, HBAEB deserves at least one vote

^^Done. Am now going to wake my kids up with an early-morning airing of "Goodbye Grace" at maximum volume.

Gut reaction is that this is either A Little Man and a House or Guns.

Nice to read that thing from Kavus.

do Cardiacs have a similar early-career-to-later-career fan divide as XTC? In both cases, I am partial to later period stuff, but perhaps is dependent on when one first heard them?

Well Dominique i must prove otherwise... I am absolutely devastated by the news about Tim for him and his family. The thought that i cant see them again or hear new stuff is hard to bear but thats just selfish. I first saw them as a teen in late 80s and was amazed by the madness and loved it. I then saw them as a student in 92 and was blown away by them again but naively thought that they were good live but i was unlikely to buy anything... how wrong i was... only a year ago i stumbled upon a copy of little man house www and ate my thoughts. Having had no cardiac contact since 92 (but a wide taste in music i might add) i was overcome and rapidly searched for more... i went thru whole back catalogue over the last year and loved tracks on all of their albums and wow the diversity intelligence creativity individuality sheer magnificence joy of emotions they create is beyond most bands even my favs. They are now permanently in my phone and my life.
I have to say though that i like bits of all albums BUT the last album "Guns" which i first heard last summer is surprisingly my fav album, yes i heard early stuff live and on cd first but guns is just brilliant perfection. To all those who selfishly want more new stuff think of this... if they finish with Guns they wont ever made a bad album in my eyes and will last forever... Stay positive Tim we all love ur genius, that will never change

I dont really think Tim was at risk of making a bad album; I am sure that LSD, whenever it gets released, is going to be incredible.

Not sure about an early career/late career divide. They didn't really change styles too much, just got less goofy and more complex. I'd imagine every obsessive fan likes all the albums to some degree.

I came to them late, but like it all.

and yeah, from the glimpses we heard (the ditzy scene EP), LSD was going to be outstanding. this morning on twitter, kavus described his work on the album as "the best guitar playing I ever did". he also describes it as a "work in progress", which is interesting.

yeah I have faith we'll see that material. everything about Cardiacs is too generous for that to not happen

I got given all the albums at once, StG was my favourite initially, then Guns took over, but now as I say probably back to StG (and Pony). Guns and OLAITS are pretty much up there alongside. HBAEB has gone up in my estimation over time and ALM... has gone SLIGHTLY down although it's still awesome.

I got ALM first which definitely had that "by the way, this is your new favorite band now" moment, especially since I was still in my prognerd phase. Guns was the one that snuck up on me. After STG it definitely seemed like a disappointment but how do you follow that up?

I'm finding this incredibly difficult. veering towards STG. or maybe a little man. or guns. or maresnest. or OLAITS. agh.

voted STG but with a heavyish heart

they followed it up by writing their *loveliest* album, a bolt of pure creaky mystic English joy. Guns deserves votes here. it's weird and small and ancient-sounding and every track is gorgeous

I have gone through periods of thinking it's obviously their best. I don't feel that way at the moment, but it's certainly not to be dismissed.

I'm probably listening to a little man more than anything else right now. actually, a whole album consisting of an endless locked groove of the second half of 'the breakfast line' would be the best cardiacs album ever.

t/s: end of The Breakfast Line vs end of Jitterbug (Junior Is A)...would have to side with the latter, it's one of my favourites full stop

Jitterbug for sure. the end of Breakfast Line is one of the few things that I'm not really sold on on that album

I am a Cardiacs poseur with only one album; HBaEB will get its vote.

frogbs, I am agog, i tell you. AGOG.

man stand far away, looks like agog standing on his hill

all of the noise takes me to the outside where's all creation joining in celebrating happiness and gog all around the world.

To gog off and things

aghast robert

prog, prog, against the gog

agronk

Tim "gogs" Smith

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Swap 'Guns' and 'sucks' and I'd pretty much agree haha

Surprised only two votes for ALM?

I was very tempted to vote for ALM, but ultimately it's not quite on a par with sing to god. arguably more cohesive, I guess... but StG, though sprawling, is at its peak heavier, noisier, more frenetic, more aggressive, more idea-dense. all of which are the aspects of cardiacs I dig the most.

4 people who give a shit enough about not giving a shit to click on the thread *and* vote? ha

Okay, who am I going to talk about Lapsus Linguae's new album with now dammit.

a look back at "On Land..." here:
http://thequietus.com/articles/15286-cardiacs-on-land-and-in-the-sea-review

this album is even better than I remembered it. I can't believe I went a couple years without seriously playing this music. It's so brilliant.

Ooh, ty! Yeah, that album was a quantum leap for...pop music, really

A quantum leap they'd already kinda made with The Seaside, which I may marginally prefer, tbf (both in my all-time top ten though)

Nice write-up. I think Cardiacs could often do with closer musical analysis by a composer or theorist, but it's well-written and unpatronising.

yeah that's a feeling I had a lot when writing it - "I wish I knew what it was called when composers did this"...there are lots of moments where a melody gets completely repurposed for another part, or jammed into another meter or time signature, but there's so much fun to be had with it that you don't even really realize that's what they're doing.

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.

A Little Man & a House was not released domestically on CD till 1995 this is a weird mis-reading of their first 10 years. This was when vinyl records were the standard medium. They had (like the Residents) self-released tons of records by this point - two studio albums, two live albums, numerous EPs & singles and a vinyl issue of a BBC R1 session. All recorded and packaged more professionally than what most independent labels were doing at the time.

And they played hundreds of gigs during this time, appeared on TV a couple of times and had decent support slots. They were doing just fine although not in the traditionally defined parameters of indie success in the 80s - ie. coverage in the weekly music press and having John Peel like you. There was still a huge & active music scene NOT being covered by Peel & the NME.

I think one thing that may have prevented this album from making more of a splash at the time was that "Baby Heart Dirt" & it's b-sides made a weak single. Especially coming after a fairly dazzling two year run of 12 inch releases: Big Ship/Too Many Irons/Is This The Life/Suzanah's Still Alive/Night Tracks, which were all their funnest, most accessible material.

Also, I just noticed the wikipedia entry for this album has a different tracklist from what I consider to be the correct one. Horsehead is not on the original album though it is on the CD and the 1995 reissue. I never think of that song as being part of the album, just as one of the lacklustre b-sides to the "Baby Heart Dirt" single. For me the album is the vinyl version as follows:

Two Bites Of Cherry
Baby Heart Dirt
The Leader Of The Starry Skys
I Hold My Love In My Arms
The Duck And Roger The Horse
Arnald
Fast Robert
Mare's Nest
The Stench Of Honey
Buds And Spawn
The Safety Bowl
The Everso Closely Guarded Line

Guess I'm kinda balking at the depiction of them as shambling, dislikable underacheivers which was not how they seemed at the time but I acknowledge that seems to be a common narrative for them.

m8 Horsehead is lovely

good post otherwise tho

My apologies if I had to thread the "common narrative" in this a lot - I live in the US and was 3 when this album came out. so I went off a lot of personal testimonies that I found. It goes without saying that they had plenty of fans in the early days though from what I could find their exposure was very limited. I had no idea that A Little Man wasn't done on CD until later. In fact even finding out what month On Land came out was a struggle. The catalogue numbers didn't make much sense.

I was surprised that "Arnald" was never a single. I never liked that "Is This the Life?" was their 'hit' because it doesn't quite hint at the craziness that they could pull off at their peak the way something like "Arnald", "Angleworm Angel", or "City Lining" does.

Yeah, Arnald would have been the best single probably, or Mares Nest.

Something that is rarely mentioned about "Is This The LIfe?" is that it was a "hit" largely because of it's inclusion in this compilation. I mean they are on the "goth" side of the album along with All About Eve, Fields of the Nephilm, Danielle Dax & Crazyhead. It's a majestic, droney song that mis-sold them to quite a few people. Think a lot of people thought of them as from the hippy end of the goth spectrum rather than as punky prog rockers.

It was a hit because Steve Wright played it frequently on R1 no?

I recall the ambient temperature of the way Cardiacs were regarded in the press as being just a bit better than Dumpy's Rusty Nuts

Well, they were associated with the free festival/cassette distro scene of which DRN were part of also. Those folks were considered to be hippies and therefore poison to the music press at the time.

..but I think that would describe the early 80s, rather than 1985-1990 which were busy and relatively prosperous for the Cardiacs. But anyway, I think it's a red herring to again analyse why they were unpopular with the music press/John Peel part of the media. Lots of great bands were similarly ignored and just forged ahead anyway.

There used to be talk of an NME boycott and some sort of genuine hatred towards Cardiacs iirc. But that talk could have been emanating from the 'pond'.

IDK, you only have to read AMG's 'reviews' of the band now for a bellwether on the critical consensus - dismissive, trite and usually completely misguided

Yeah they're so fucking weeeeird and freaky, fuck offfff

Oh, I actually believe that story about the NME but I think it's kind of irrelevant. There was probably tons of bands and scenes that were deemed as unofficially or officially off-limits by the NME, Melody Maker etc, simply as part of their regular editorial policy. They were rigorous about policing the genres, politics & backgrounds of bands they covered back then. It was a quite claustrophobic.

eg. I think that's what 500 posts on the Queen thread this weekend are all about.

I'd ask Ned if he could wangle an AMG revision of the Cardiacs catalogue, but there's no point really

I recall when I was young, my father used to buy Q and Uncut all the time, and I gained a musical perspective of the world from those two magazines. When I discovered the internet and the fact that there was so, so much more to it all, I felt genuinely betrayed. Music magazines really were and are hateful cultish trash

It's just a pity that Cardiacs weren't a little further along the line, popularity wise before Tim had his accident, as they could have parlayed their assets into a reasonable way to pay for his care.

I know that might sound a little off, but to me it's still much less gauche than Steven Wilson releasing another fucking live album blu ray box set because he needs a new kitchen.

yeah for all the big names who profess themselves as fans there weren't really a lot of big names on the tribute album. though I really don't see Steven Wilson or Radiohead being able to pull it off.

it does really suck that LSD or whatever never got finished. if it was indeed a double after a decade of inactivity it's hard to imagine it being anything less than amazing, and it seemed like by then there was a decently-sized international fanbase and plenty of publications willing to give it loads of press. a lot of the fans I've interacted with online didn't have any clue who they were back when their last studio album came out.

lol Wilson's a douche but he did contribute to the Smith fundraiser so we gotta cut him a tiny bit of slack

I recently bought Sing To God off the Cardiacs website - much of that money goes to Smith - so there's still a willingness to leverage a campaign of sorts. You're right, though - it's only going to be dribs and drabs

You can hear tiny snippets of LSD here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBDRAqocYlc

^was about to post this :D

There's an absolutely wondrous unreleased Smith solo song as well out there, *might* have made it to LSD:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBdJDG0abUY

Seems like they were stalled for a lot of years. The period that could have made a big difference and where working more closely with other bands and labels might have been more productive was the years surrounding Sing To God. Nowadays you can look back on that as being an amazing double album but it was over-ambitious. It felt like they bit off more than they could handle and failed in some respects (ie. advertised releases never showed up or were endlessly delayed, tours got shorter, shows got smaller, the newsletters stopped). There was some fairly high-profile stuff in that period, with Mark & Lard and Blur promoting them, but the other bands and labels they worked with were all kind of their followers so it felt like they were more isolated than ever, in a clique of their own creation. And the actual releases dried up. And maybe the inactivity cost them band members too.

I love the Garage Concert CDs but I wonder sometime how much time they spent preparing that stuff when they could've been working on new material.

NOT, I hasten to add, that any of this really matters. Seems Cardiacs is one of those bands where there's a lot of playing "What If" about. Really, the 85-90 period was tremendous and the 90s yeilded three fantastic albums and a bunch of extra stuff that is of top quality so certainly no complaints from me.

TBF, Guns and Pony both came out 3/4 years after STG - I wasn't there at the time but I suspect that the problem period wasn't then. When you've recorded and released probably the most monumental album in the history of recorded sound you've gotta permit yourselves a fallout period. You may be right about the SGCs but I absolutely adore that shit - rightfully brought back into the foreground.

Smith's strokes just completely fucked with the program. I'm sure they had it all under control, and were content to go at their own pace. I'd prefer to think of that as the bottom line, really. Music isn't a competition! xpost yeah exactly :)

My favourite moment from that era I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS44cZNo66M

I wish I could decipher the lyrics.

That whole album's lyrics were taken from http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30411/pg30411.html iirc. Worth a browse. It's one of Smith's best albums, yeah.

And actually I think Ditzy Scene (the song) is the only time Smith's really ripped himself off (it's basically an update on Don't You Ail...)

Kav wrote that I think

haha o god that might explain it

j/k kav, knifeworld roolz

He did once explain in an interview that fans would be surprised if they played I think Guns (or maybe it was STG) backwards because he had reused melodies from previous albums, just reversed them. The idea that some mad fan would subsequently do so seems like that may have been a prank.

that is exactly the sort of thing he would say as a prank :D