Cardiacs are one of my favourite bands. And they should be one of yours.
The nerve is bared the sense is real.
This Summer gone wasn’t exactly the one we’d hoped for.
During the early part of the year, perhaps for a little sanity, I was distancing. Mostly from the fact that the Climate is totally FUBAR. And then COVID19 arrived, which put a new spin on that term.
A few weeks ago that I learnt about the sad death of Tim Smith, the surreal and creative mind behind Cardiacs. He had been ill for quite some time and had withdrawn from music in 2008 due to dystonia, a condition brought on by a heart attack he suffered. At this present time, I’m also going through a period where a relative’s recent diagnosis is making me sensitive to things I would normally shrug off — and so it hit me harder than I would have thought. This post is a little more morbid than some of my previous ones.
To be into a band, a type of music etc. seems to me one of the more fitting phrasal verbs in English. It implies a warm, secure connection with something. I was not into Cardiacs until a few years ago, although I knew a few songs. I think I had always read them as on the “New-wave to alternative” spectrum (hard to fathom lyrics but with a sense of mischief, contrast between chorus and verse — evident in a band like Pixies music, heavier parts but not totally enthralled to “heaviness” etc.) Cool band. Nice imagery. But I wasn’t into them as such.
Then for some deeply forgotten / repressed reason I started to listen to them a little more. And liked it.
You hear a lot of talk about ASMR these days. Videos of people rubbing their disposable crockery together whilst making lip-smacks like a dripping tap just don’t tickle my meridians — sorry folks. Youtube has reels and reels of this kind of stuff — some of it is interesting, but a lot I just find weirdly amusing. When I was younger, the timbre of certain people’s voices used to give me this ASMR response (which I found awkward, often assuming it was something sexual or improper). Cardiacs’ music can induce a this autonomous, sensory, dope hit. Tracks like “In a City Lining” and “Dirty Boy” generate crackles that rise up the back of my neck.
There’s science behind the verse-curses that enchant your synapses this way. I am not going to relive the traumatic confusion of A Level Music again (musical theory was never my jam) but many of the songs evince the Lydian Mode (whole tones and major 4th sharpening). You can listen about that here, at around 6.54:
You can eat cereal without milk, but at that special point just before the sugary cardboard shards turn to mush, yet are still a bit wet, you can taste something really good. It’s a feeling of not knowing exactly where your senses are— the damp dairy product world or the dry cereal husk one. This is how smoking a joint, while listening to some good music, feels. Cardiacs have some good songs for tripping — you can get lost in the musical seascape whilst still being on Terra Firma. But there’s a sense that you can’t stay in the clouds too long. Mischief is never far away. Musical hard corners and ruptures are often there to bring you down in the song, apart from during very spacey tracks like “Jitterbug (Junior is A).”
Then there are the words.
Ok, they they are not so apart from those produced by bands like Neutral Milk Hotel or other weird folk offerings, but combined with some of the prior mentioned things, the effect is magical. There is a quality them that verges on delirious; that kind of “late night — brain-360 degree spinning-too-many-ideas-for-one-head” moment. Their pattern sometimes overpowers any intention the melody had for ordered listening.
“I’ll break off all of your charm!” says World
Her egg will burst and will arrive
A man who calls his own tune
Thinking it’s so good to be alive
Says, “If these are the best what are the rest to be life?”
As for me I struggle with words and wisdom accusing
“It’s you, it’s me, it’s him”, you see.
Or in “Fiery Gun Hand.”
“Hello sir I’m in a tango in a different timing I will never lose my anger,
I haven’t got a secret
Secrets are in my secret box down my avenue
Suck away my tiny dress
I’m cleaner than a filthy mess
Cleaner than a big mess!”
Full stops get lost somewhere, and sentences fall over. Yet the effect is not completely jarring, merely a collection of random words. There is a kind of mood-sound-connection, like in Kurt Schwitters’ poetry.
We could say then, that our rather reductive, Cardiacs song recipe goes something like this: 1) Weird tonalities and quiver-inducing quavers 2) Soaring or spacey oceanic moments interspersed with folly 3) Words that meander and connect in strange and unfamiliar syntax. The three elements result in something: a musical concoction known as “Pronk.” It’s music too playful to be prog, but too ornate to be punk.
I feel sad about Tim Smith’s death, although I never knew him. At moments in our life, when we we feel pain, when our heroes decline from intractable conditions or our relatives succumb to illness, a little nonsense can feel good.
Absurdity often does you good. We may not be able to say this about mental illness in general (and there’s a discussion for another day about whether our value systems present a flawed understanding of what madness is). But I spent many years working in a nursing homes, with people disassembled by dementia and cast adrift by bouts of delirium. An emerging conversation can often crest the wave of absurdity — sometimes even it is sustained by it. We don’t always need to talk about something in particular, and indeed the act of talking itself can reassure us. Too often healthcare workers are so concerned with the seriousness of their job, and not enough with letting patients talk. They feel stupid adding nonsensical things themselves. But they shouldn’t.
Zygmunt Bauman observed we can only ever stop thinking about “it” for a while, before it resurfaces in our psyche. People close to Tim Smith’s death will be going through terrible upset, and that fucking sucks. Grief is not just simple sadness, and not akin even to melancholia, really. Grief is sometime an attempt at re-anchoring things that have been pulled away. But the prior order of life may never come back. There is no one size fits all form of mourning. Death is ultimately irrational. It pulls in different directions like the words of a Cardiacs song, and yet it is set against the grandiose, whilst ultimately being ridiculous. We have no knowledge of what is beyond Death, and yet it’s Life’s biggest certainty. We are faced with a World that demands productiveness and fights futilely to establish a meaningful order — all in the laughing-skull-face of personal tragedy, genocide and extinction…
Well sod that for a game of soldiers. We should allow people their weird music, their nonsense, their grief:
When is it good or not good
To perceive a petrifying life
Or to solving a problem that’s
Here tomorrow gone today.
Some Other Good Stuff:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/grief-in-the-time-of-covid-19/
Zgymunt Bauman on Death: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2437
