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Rating: How many times, in my reflections aimed at analyzing an album, and in identifying its strengths as well as its weaknesses, have I only been able to fantasize about how it would have turned out with a better production, or the addition of one instrument in place of another, or even by swapping tracks from two albums in succession to create a masterpiece and a simple work without a head.
Over the years and with that bit of musical experience I've lived, summing it all up, I've consciously realized how much creativity has been swept away, yesterday as today, by market logics and compromises deemed such by record executives, but often seen as non-negotiable blackmail by many musicians dissatisfied with the finished product, a shattered dream for many of them.
The list of names that have built a career in "non-alignment" in the last half-century of music is surprisingly short, and it is even more so when the albums they have released are many, but when privilege is molded to the point of concealing the real side in favor of the more grotesque and irreverent aspects, the count just started is already over.
In the Punk England of '77 everything visibly burned out like a lit cigarette not smoked, a sight many kids unable to jump on that bandwagon perceived better than many words, a warning to look ahead holding only certain teachings dearly, often preserving the attitude. The Cardiac Arrest was born from those ashes, in the will to do and in palpable misery, they grew technically without noticing, sneaking secretly into a small often unwatched studio to record demos, picking up any used tape to make copies. When their clandestinity was discovered, instead of an angry owner, a strange character appeared, introducing himself as The Consultant, later joined by a female assistant, Miss Swift: both would play a key role in the band's economy for at least a decade, organizing concerts, shaping the look, and highlighting their childish and irreverent aspect, but above all, building around them a total complacency corporate regime, The Alphabet Business Concern, a perfect British Style script between art and ideology, an ideal escape from reality to gain followers and celebrate the myth.
With the last demo, The Seaside, released on vinyl only at the end of '80, the diminutive Cardiacs was already musically a world apart, thanks to formidable additions in the lineup led by guitarist and singer Tim Smith and his brother Jim on bass: after the first EPs, in 1986 the time finally came in a proper studio for the first official album. The search for a Mellotron, at the time a real treasure hunt, ended successfully with the use of Martin Orford's M400, keyboardist of IQ: in 24 hours William D. Drake masterfully managed to record not only all the parts, predominantly 8-Choir, but also to save the samples for subsequent works. The real monster in action is therefore heard only in these grooves, creating the illusion of the New Prog setup in the first solemn bars of In A City Lining, a rich preview of a goosebumps-inducing change, where a waltz at an ever faster metronome, perfectly in line with Tim's cheeky singing, Punk to the core, transforms into a contagiously choral Ska refrain of drunk lost hooligans. The anthem Is This The Life?, conversely, stands magnificently on a single guitar riff and a single vocal refrain, in a solid wall of sound made more interesting by the substantial sax insert by the imaginative Sarah Smith, Tim's wife, and a killer guitar solo: it would be their only Hit-Single. The technique reigns everywhere, but also the sacred gift of offering hooks and catchiness at the touch of a magic wand: Dive is a symptomatic example in its Cabaret-Punk manner, Dominic Luckman's drumming like a train going straight through every station accompanies the festive passengers among the jingles and xylophones of the conductor-percussionist Tim Quy in a rollercoaster ride, exhilarating as a sniff of pure ether.
The album seems to be a concept about the flattening and futile competition of the human race, seen through the long rows of English houses cramped against each other, and in the utopian dream of one big apartment where everyone can live together contributing their own, ceasing to mutually copy furnishings, customs, and lifestyles by each retreating into their own pen. The Title Track is strategically placed at the beginning and end of the album to underline the discomfort: A Little Man And A House, in its suburban parade, marks the daily chimes of the average man, whose phrase "That's the way we all go", appears in other episodes of the album, while in the epilogue The Whole World Window Tim Smith explodes in all his anger and despair as if shouting from his house window, crying and cursing against the world that watches indifferently, in the harmonic frame of a wonderful melody, a finale of great emotional impact, worthy of certain Progressive works of the past but totally immersed in that present where no one managed to keep up with them, making them one of the few great secrets of English Rock.
For many years now Tim Smith has been living like a vegetable in a squalid sanatorium, after a terrible stroke that left him mute and paralyzed in a wheelchair: in his musician's life, he never got rich, his companions haven't lost hope of seeing him recovered, and stars of Damon Albarn and Neil Hannon's caliber have moved with benefits to allow for his expensive treatments.
The Cardiacs, along with Gentle Giant, two bands with more than one point in common, are my favorite group.
Hi Tim, I still hope too.
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