TLDR At this point, lost in Pet Fezant, for all I fucking care, I could be in walmart looking intently at the graphic design of a sack of cat food, getting completely lost in the undulating stripes on the stock photo of an adult tabby male, weeping, totally astonished and moved. I wouldn’t care who laughs at me, as long as they let me keep staring at these sights. As long as they don’t call for security and have me escorted out of the building. I won’t bother anybody. I won’t threaten any sort of status-quo anywhere. I quite honestly just want to feel these little cycling patterns ripple through me, forever. Nothing else matters.
Rarely, you might have a brush with something (music, art, stuff like that) so sharp that it cuts a sort of psychic hole in your world. Some people aren’t open to this, but imagine that you are: imagine that you take the time to examine the hole, you try to understand how it happened or who caused it. Maybe, if you’re like me, you hate your home world so much that even without understanding it, you’re just totally ready to go through the hole. Recklessly, you just go. And then what?
This grotesquely too-easy metaphor comes from novelist Philip Pullman: his “subtle knife” is so sharp that it cuts holes in the world. It cuts spacetime. In the pop physics of Pullman’s 1997 novel, which I just re-read with my daughter, our universe is merely one of countless billions; its singular physical fabric exists in isolation, a totality unto itself. But, parallel worlds exist, too–they’re also ‘there’, somewhere, elsewhere, also complete unto themselves, isolated and unreachable. Foreign universes never interact with each other until this infinitely sharp knife wounds them both, and binds them together, by slicing a little connective window. The knife’s user can then travel through: leave his home universe and enter a new one. If the window is left open, so can anybody.
Why cut a window, much less go through? We watch some of Pullman’s characters traverse multiple universes just because they are vaguely noodling around. We meet others who methodically hunt the most important throughlines of their lives through a maze of jarringly different, now-porous worlds. But now that (in postmodernity) the doors have been cut, any given world can no longer remain discrete and unaffected by the others. Incongruous climates, flows of electromagnetic radiation, and virally contagious ecosystems mingle.
These acts–the use of the knife, the act of cutting windows, and the act of traveling through them–all have particular and extremely grave costs. Nobody discovers all their consequences until Pullman’s story is nearly over.
Like I said, this scenario from The Subtle Knife is my ham-handed metaphorical preamble and I’ll circle back to it and it’ll make sense. I bring it up partly because Pullman’s saga of cosmic atheism left a strong impression me when I first encountered it, at around my daughter’s age. His work scaffolded what would become my mature understanding of art, music, literature and the phenomena possible through them. His were among the first texts I ever remember reading that made me really, really nightmarishly upset. But, they also struck me with the elementary awareness that, in fiction, we can be compensated for such intense discomfort. This happens when artists offer us beautiful sights, impossible ironies, dreamlike poesis of events, a trip through a convincingly real other place. Stumbling through a window, into some foreign reality, can be unbelievably unpleasant; it can also be worthwhile, though there’s no guarantee.
Re-reading His Dark Materials as an adult, I was unsure Pullman’s grand images and thriller-style pacing (I now absolutely hate being asked to put up with suspense in narrative fiction) wouldn’t fall flat or seem cheap. They didn’t; 20+ years later, I reaffirm my original impression of Mr. Pullman as someone really using the knife, a writer with enough discipline to pull off something as stressful and awe-inducing as opening this portal to a foreign world. It holds up. So I respectfully place Mr. Pullman in the same category as other artists I’ll mention in this incredibly fucking long “album review”.
With this already-bloated preamble to my attempt to discuss Cardiacs’ album, LSD, released September 19th, 2025, note also that I don’t feel so much that I’m “reviewing an album” as that I’m truly trying to describe a foreign universe. This is frankly pretty humiliating, but my honest feeling is that writing about this album feels like writing about something with immense spiritual gravity. I am aware that the attempt will sound proportionally insane.
I’m not saying “the music is good” or that you will like it. I am saying it’s affected me so particularly that it demands this much of my focus and attention.
Cardiacs’ music is no longer just “music” to me–it’s an open, difficult wound in my world, a hole that leads me to (and messily entangles my own world with) a disorienting foreign universe. I have stupidly, accidentally, even unwillingly, wandered into, and become stuck in this place: I want to write back to you what it’s been like to spend so much of my time over here.
I also want to get to the bottom of exactly why and how this music and its makers use power like this. I mean this ontologically, not technically. This album leaves me asking not, “How did they write, play and record the songs?” but “What does it mean that this is possible?”
As a painter, I think this question would haunt me regardless of how many (or how few) other real people experience anything similar about this specific catalogue. Even before LSD, Cardiacs’ output amounted to the kind of library that has made me foam at the mouth praying that I could ever produce anything, in any medium, with a fraction of its power. But regarding the particular cache of music by this “band”, I think there are, at absolute maximum, some few thousands of people who at present might say they experience Cardiacs similarly.
In the era of “fandom,” nothing feels more demeaning than writing multiple-thousand-word essays that no one will read, about some music you found online–right? Well uh, I’m hardly alone in the compulsion to obliterate dignity glazing these old people. Cardiacs are the type of band that incites hundreds of aesthetically challenged youtubers to spew forth thousands of hours of “analysis” using music theory, attempts to reconstruct the work into sheet music, painstaking 8-bit covers, and other highly time-consuming works of spectral fixation. One David Minnick took his obsession a lot further than I intend to.
The common denominator to these compulsions is that it’s really not enough for us to just “listen” to Cardiacs. It feels like the actual music doesn’t emerge until you try to understand it structurally, or even spatially. This music makes people want to physically enter it, and somehow explore it in extreme structural detail for ourselves, whether through memorization, covers, digital dissection and reconstruction, or whatever form of immersion is closest at hand.
Ok, ok, ok, getting to the point, Cardiacs’ latest album, LSD, was released on September 19, 2025. For several years before that date, I have been droning on about this album’s hypothetical existence to anybody who would listen. I’m an excitable music listener, but also very picky. Nonetheless, anybody who knows me has watched me become basically a zonked, monologuing deadhead for this crew of fucking boomers (and genX “psychedelic rock” dorks). Anybody who’s spent time around me in the last 6 years has surely observed the unique delusional mania that this situation has provoked in my life.
I write this after 14 weeks of daily listens. I wasn’t trying to listen to it so much, but given the buildup it’s not surprising that it’s panned out like this. Nor will it be surprising if the fixation goes on for years. Over time, this cluster of music will become part of my life, part of my lucid dreamscapes and the garbled dream-language residue blurted out I wake up, part of my paintings, part of my imagination. Last night I dreamed that my 95-year-old grandma sent me a cache of links to rare, previously unseen Cardiacs live vids; I woke up with tears of hangry joy in my eyes. If I live long enough to get dementia, I’ll be humming Cardiacs melodies in the nursing home.
When I speak about their music, I absolutely already sound like I’ve got dementia; as you will discover if you keep reading, attempts at track descriptions produce the most high-end hors d’ourves alzheimers word salad.
Word salad: that reminds me. Regarding the album’s title: after thinking it over, it turns out I can’t actually agree with a certain long-term collaborator of mine who contends that “LSD makes you smarter.” … … Stay with me, please… Ok, sure: I’ve seen it arguably “make people” feel smarter, and sometimes, oddly enough, this feeling alone really does somehow make people act smarter… … But in probably ten times as many cases I’ve seen it instead just make people more annoying.
Never having partaken of the stuff myself (believe it or not) (being born functionally too acid-basted for it to be deemed a safe escalation, at least not until I turn 50 or 60) I can’t speak to the qualities of actual LSD trips but from the outside. Despite the fact that it’s 2025 and all coherence has been sledgehammered into little unintelligible shards to the point that my “material reality” looks exactly like the damn hippies’ proverbial kaleidoscope, I myself have, at absolute most generous, an ambivalently tolerant relationship to “psychedelic” stuff articulated as such. After all, for better or worse, “psychedelic” is now just fully the inescapable normal form given to my home world, my entire environment. Nevertheless, as I wrote before, I mostly just find it cringe.
By all accounts, primary Cardiacs songwriter Tim Smith did use the word “psychedelic,” or, alternately, he just called his music, in the euphemism of the Cardiacs half-century, “pop.” I’ve always liked the humility and disengagement of his use of these descriptors. So, then, the choice to just straight up call the album “LSD” can be taken in this same vein: humility, honesty. “It’s just what you think it is.”
Here’s the thing–this quality of “honesty” is precisely the double-edged risk I most associate with LSD trips and the people who take them. After all, lying (lying: the ability to construct a story artfully and with particular, critical, carefully balanced relation to context) is, in many situations, a gracious and generative activity. But in the intensity and bafflement of the trip and its aftermath, lying, confabulating, rationalizing apparently becomes simply too confusing for them. I’ve watched hordes of psychonauts then increasingly just neglect these tasks, and default helplessly to “honesty”–even when this neglect will leave them exposed to dork/ moron/ annoying burnout allegations. They can’t do otherwise.
Will this abdication to humble honesty, coerced, sometimes irreversibly, by acid’s scorch of sheer cognitive overload, empower artists to produce portals to beautiful new worlds–worlds formed thoroughly enough, with enough solidity, that other real people can actually enter them and explore them?
Or, will filter-melt and compulsive “honesty” instead just bore and annoy the fuck out of everyone you meet for the rest of your life?
I dunno. It’s a toss-up.
I just know that, however they got there, Cardiacs clearly do have a sort of LSD filter-melt in play–but they’ve also managed to maintain the ability to exercise incredibly tight and consistent structuring control over what goes into their word salad. The result is that they are, undeniably, artists working in high gear within their own terms, terms they’ve spent decades developing. I mean by this that they’re able and confident enough to risk everything for the self-contained integrity of their foreign universe, obey the laws of some far-away dimension.
By ‘risk everything,’ I mean not only the devotion of insane time, effort and resources for dubious promise of ever receiving sufficient financial or energetic return, I also mean that they’re willing to risk not being understood. They’re willing to look stupid. They’re willing to look crazy, pretentious, boring, nerdy, spectral, etc. They’re willing to keep being a band for nearly 50 years without ever getting back anything close to proportional external validation, by any metric. They’re willing to be seen as massive losers by Earth metrics. But for all that, they have if nothing else totally and utterly convinced me that the throughlines of coherence they’re following are completely real–truly foreign, coming from some inhuman ultraviolet pulse or lucid dream dimension, but absolutely real.
Stay with me…
“We like everything,” Tim Smith says on a BBC radio interview. The conversation was about ‘genres’. “We really, really, I don’t think there’s a tune that’s ever been written by anyone that we don’t like.”
“…And that’s your criteria,” the host affirms vaguely. “If it’s good, you’re into it!”
“If it’s good we’re into it… If it’s bad, we’re into it,” he mumbles. “We really like everything. Everything.”
The host laughs. “I can’t believe that.”
“Believe it,” Tim says.
“I like the noise of scratchy little insects,” Jim adds.
I do believe them–and I kind of think this assertion really does sort of ‘explain’ the sheer range of sounds they draw from, play with. Any piece of music could be a portal worth going through, at least worth exploring. There are little self-contained modes of aesthetic organization literally everywhere. Even a horrible place is interesting. Everything has intricate, strange internal logic of some kind. In order to use the subtle knife to enter other worlds, one has to be capable of feeling around in space without prejudices: believing in the reality, the legitimacy, of places you haven’t been yet, places you aren’t from. These worlds all have something to offer, even if it’s something nasty. From this position, there’s no point in rejecting them (merely because they might be, for instance, mortifyingly cringe).
But how do you navigate through thousands of possible portals to divergent aesthetic environments? How do you curate which strange internal logic to play with, when everything is potentially on the table? My own experience with this question is that you have to sort of abandon consciously reasoning through things; never rummage through the pile of infinite clutter with too many rationalizations in mind. You have to be incredibly patient, diligent, and willing to endure pain, but also simultaneously willing to let something else guide your hand; you have to be capable of trusting that something else to point you the right way. You have to be absolutely devoted to following the rules, while not trying to know consciously what the rules are. For this to be possible, you have to be capable of absolute faith: maybe in a concept of “fate” (in the Baudrillardian sense, yes take a shot I mentioned JB, of always awaiting that ironic, impossible conjunction that links elements while inverting meaning) or as a God, or something like a superstition. (Philip Pullman writes eloquently of another name for this force, and another tool for accessing it.)
For example, fate will demand that you admit into your life a demented painting of a muscular kangaroo with stringy hair surrounded by clover, and if you unquestioningly honor the selection (and wait 30ish years) you’ll eventually find out what it’s meant for.
Undaunted by the potential for pointlessly disorganized incoherence that emerges when every type of music is potentially in the mix (and, in my opinion, because they know how to listen diligently to this inhuman, fateful force) Cardiacs, in their (to date) 48-year lifespan, took it upon themselves to build an insane quantity of perversely cohesive and grand structures out of wildly divergent parts. Their music is always deeply confusing, incredibly intricate, but never “chaotic”. Somehow, it builds on itself by endlessly diverging from itself. LSD is only the latest result of this ambitious project.
I’m ready to swear that Cardiacs’ catalogue, taken as a whole, really does have, and rigorously obeys, a set of self-consistent aesthetic rules–but the problem is that they’re operative along the 27th dimension or something. The rules: I know they’re there, I can feel them playing out, but I can’t boil them down to anything without sounding crazy. For instance, I started fleshing out a paragraph (and ended up scrapping it because, well, it sounded crazy) something along the lines of ‘what if there really is a higher dimension that operates like 3D space, but its physical principles involve structures of resonance generated by complex associative stylistic echoes?‘
…
One more explanitory tangent: in 2021, I spent two days at the City Museum in St. Louis (one day with my daughter, and one day alone). This “building” (I guess you’d call it) is the work of a different filter-melted and highly disciplined, confident crazy person, a Mr. Bob Cassilly. Now there’s a guy that makes you think, “Perhaps this man has a relationship with LSD.” Watch this short interview and decide for yourself. (Did it “make him smarter,” or the other thing?)
For those who aren’t familiar, Mr. Cassilly and his associates assembled a world: of caves, tunnels, trees, ladders, aquariums, towers, topiary, exhibits, elevators, arcades, multiple suspended airplanes, mosaics, tarps, mesh, taxidermy libraries, trampolines, terrifying wire pathways through mid-air, medieval torture chambers, tanks of fish that nibble your dead skin off, sculptural mazes, skateboard ramps, a circus, a ferris wheel into the sky, a ten-story slide in darkness, and thousands of other elements.
Mr. Cassilly, in his (by all accounts) intense interpersonal dysfunction and selfishness, compulsiveness, dilation of perspective, and acute ethical negligence, allowed himself, and demanded that this world allow him, to get completely and absolutely lost in his own agenda. In the genesis of the City Museum, Mr. Cassilly was, evidently, fully absorbed to arguably a destructive degree in the relentless hunger to see his lucid-dream-nightmare-world become a real place for real people to physically explore.
By way of this process, this sacrifice of time, money and energy, he did in fact make something remarkable and insane come into existence. Then he made it accessible to the public. He died in the process of expanding his world, at an even larger plot of land he’d secured and was building out; he was killed in an apparent bulldozer accident, under questionable circumstances.
I’d heard about this place, and heard it was “pretty crazy,” but my visit completely surpassed anything I could have imagined. I did not utilize any LSD but my trip was a transformative experience. I crawled through its caves, stared down its vaults, got stuck, got nervous, then mortally terrified, then literally got lost; each new element stunned me first with its inexplicable inclusion and then a second time with its baffling physical situatedness in relation to everything else.
While exploring this world, the entire time, I had an earbud in my ear playing Cardiacs and Sea Nymphs. I am religiously grateful to have had a chance to inhabit the reverent envy I feel of the power to materialize these fully-formed, impossible spatial phenomena. I mean both: the City Museum and also the music of Cardiacs.
These worlds and the processes of opening them up are not “safe”: I spent a lot of the day thinking about the risk, harm, and sacrifice involved in the endeavors. To use the subtle knife, you must first let it cut off a few of your fingers. I think this is an important visualization of the physical sacrifice necessary to create things. The other world cannibalizes whoever cuts the door, to say nothing of the neighborhood, the other places, problems, people and things that could’ve been fed resources instead. At the City Museum I thought a lot about the creators of these works and the ways in which the works parasitized them, diverted them away from other lives they could’ve had, or even injured them, the ways that making things almost always injures you in some way, injures your world of origin, your family and friends, your body. I thought about Bob Cassilly and Tim Smith as people who, each in different ways, opened up something so bogglingly powerful that they ultimately (whether via associative logic, or literally) lost their lives in it/because of it/through it.
The day LSD came out, I had to go to work. I had to get in my car and drive to work, and then work my job. But–delusionally–I did not feel that I was at work, or that I was even on Earth. The aforementioned subtle knife had cut an exit, and I had slipped through.
…
Notwithstanding everything I just wrote in seriousvoice™, in general I have a pretty severe allergy to selfseriousness. I wonder what it is about certain works that bypasses this effect. It must be something about scale: regular-scale selfseriousness makes me groan, but multiply the quality a gazillion bajillion times and it becomes pretty funny, then seductive, and, ultimately, really moving.
That’s Men in Bed. It played as I pulled out of my driveway and slid into traffic. Its spatially vast, mythically overbearing impact widened my eyes and filled them with tears. Even before I could feel my way through the unintuitive pulses of its theatrical chords and mostly-gaps-rhythms, my face was mouthing the central assertion. Yeah! Sure! Whatever you say! I surrender!
I surrender!
Durr!
An aching muscle-like sensation somewhere in my central nervous system painfully relaxed, a sense of anticipation (I hadn’t even realized how consuming and tense, as if it had been there my whole life) dissipated like magic. Yeah. I understand! Some would stop the birds from singing if they could! Those assholes. We already know who they are. Better free those damn birds, get them out of there! Fly ‘way, free! I shouldn’t be driving a car. I’m on a cliffside, I can leap off of it, glide and bounce over the wet rocks. I can fly! I surrenDURR! I’m onlooking a situation at once totally unintelligible and also, impossibly, utterly recognizable. It’s a dream retroactively invented but absolutely clear. I knew with complete certainty every intimate detail of the whole nonexistent backstory in a burst of awareness: the ships, the tower, the guns, the corpses. Durr! Time to change lanes!
The evil genie of fate is at work here, nailing the visceral response from something so simple. I felt a sense of relief like I’d waited thousands of years to hear the empty space between these odd little chords. It hurt so much to be oriented, again, somehow, to recognize a world in the aftermath of so many deaths.
Later on, I think over that moment. As its closest superficial comparison is something like music from an early 2000s video game, or one of those youtube compilations called things like “Relaxing With Dramatic War Movie Soundtrack Tunes,” Men In Bed kind of buries the lede or at the very least thwarts expectations of a “pop” album. In most cases I’d say it’s a big risk to open any type of album with songs this ‘dire’, but it has a precedent. Much like Cardiacs’ main grandiose anthem (opening track of Heaven Born And Ever Bright–utterly baffling when I first heard it), and also echoing the mythic tenderness of Sing to God’s spell-like opener, Men In Bed is fully in line with the ritualistic way Cardiacs worlds are entered. It seduces not through “fun” but through an aggressive attempt at suffocation, pleasurable asphyxiation, via grandiose amazement, a shot at the moon. If nothing else, opening your album with something like this will definitely just filter out some listeners. You’ll only keep listening to something this nuts if you’re curious enough to be patient, or if you’re already primed to yield to its power, cognitively drop everything, and enter the foreign environment.
The May stampedes in, a horny/gross/frenzied detonation. Rather than echoing from castle battlements or whatever, the vocals are, transitionlessly, now being shouted right up in my ear, frantic, angsty, and intimate. I’m abruptly relocated: stuck in muddy farmland with wet shoes, just as a thunderstorm is about to open up overhead. The grass is blinding green and only seems to get greener as the sky darkens. The damp air is methane-smelly and volatile. Static electricity buzzes and frizzes on every strand of grass and every piece of body hair. It’s exciting and stressful.
The May has similar imagery and acceleration as some other abruptly-accelerating second tracks, notably the dissonant psychosis of Eat It Up Worms Hero and the rubbery aggression of There’s Good Cud. The choral drone of the line “If I were your cow, I’d run when I saw you” seems to come from the same accusatory barnyard as the line from There’s Good Cud, “Fuck you, you! Don’t you get me!” I wonder what it is with cows, farmland, the earthy violence (but also, in all three cases, well-ventilated, windy lightness) of these second-track landscapes. (She Is Hiding Behind The Shed, another cumulonimbical stampede of a second track, albeit one with no livestock, which also bursts in on the heels of a solemn anthemic opener, was one of the songs initially responsible for luring me through the Cardiacs window in the first place.)
The tension is relieved in the choral swells, a few moments of nonsensical deep relaxation via overwhelming vocal buzz. I’m ascending the highway ramp, but I’m also fixated on these gray-black thunderheads where they bloom and expand overhead. I’m surrounded and drowning in loud crackling lightning like a million squealing zippers being unzipped in every direction. When the berserk refrain finally hits, invoking the ambiance of a stairwell in which someone’s dumped 9000 rubber balls, and cutting off the frustrated and rich “gang vocals”™, I hear the sky crack open and I smell the mud.
As suddenly as it began, The May hurtles seamlessly into Gen. It feels like waking up by rolling out of bed: a brutal but inevitable-feeling transition. Of course! I love hearing LSD‘s first quenchingly clear sounds of Tim’s voice, gently but urgently singing from beyond death and surrounded with vertiginous choral surging.
If there were a predatory church that offered music like this I reckon it could really fuck up my life. I’m brainwashed. I’m ready to roll in the aisles, blubbering. (Instead, though, I’m at work, cleaning soap scum and pubes off some dipshit’s tub.) I love this new version, pounding religiosity amped up higher than ever. The EP version of Gen has been out for years, but the songwriting feels as if it only now makes sense, fused oceanically with The May.
Gen is bisected by what I’ve always felt is a rather ridiculous ZZ-Top-ass twanging guitar solo–we’ve burst out laughing when we hear it and muttered, what the fuck is this? Why does it sound like this? 27th dimension logic; they don’t care “how it sounds,” they let fate select something, and of course it winds up being the right thing; against reason (and dignity), it works. Then, back into a rolling, violent ocean. Can you jam anything else into that scary harmony? It feels crammed to bursting. It occurs to me that some dork on the internet is already out there filming himself as he’s trying to break down what the chord is and why it sounds like that. It feels like matter itself is screaming. The molasses-reluctant chord changes and highlighter-yellow resonant droning richness calls to mind a shrill choir vibrating every tile inside a massive cathedral, crossed with, of all things, extremely sped-up Louisiana sludge metal progressions.
I’m assembling a vacuum cleaner and filling up a mop bucket as Gen burns out like a scorched fluorescent tube. I must call out the fact that Gen concludes, technically, with a fucking truck driver key change–my FAVORITE! Hilarious! Apocalyptic! Inhuman! Screech, screech, screech. Really, really, silly, so silly that it seems directly referent to a theological doctrine of some sort, not expressible in Earth terms.
Woodeneye busts in; I already wrote several thousand words about this song when it was released as a single August 1, 2025. After months of my scrutiny and interrogation, here, at track #4, I feel that it now, like a puzzle piece wedged into its correct spot, finally reveals its magnificent display. I also feel even more powerfully embarassed about loving it than I did in August. If you never listened to Cardiacs and you heard only this song out of context, you might think, “Ah, the type of shit they play in a tattoo shop where 57-year-old men get tribal tats on the bicep.” “Ah, the type of shit they play in a walgreens where the county’s edgiest manager has gauged ears and forbids staff from changing the radio away from the alt rock internet station his brother runs.”
I guess LSD is frontloading its hysteria: arguably not a typical Cardiacs choice. Strobing and buzzing much like Core, spazzing much like To Go Off And Things, this track unravels itself in strands of ferile hedonism; it feels frivolous while somehow also comprised of the same grand solemnity flavoring the previous songs. Where most of these other songs feel like environments, Woodeneye is, to me, a sort of baffling object. A treasured object, a precious, expensive drug unto itself. Its shrill, cathartic indistinctness and mystery vibrate and flash. As I said in my other “review,” this song reminds me of formative favorites of J.A. Seazer’s work: Earth as a Character Gallery, Conic Absolute Egg Algebra, et al.
“Make him kiss it, make him cry”: word salad alert: it’s the closest thing LSD gives us to a Come Back Clammy Lammy-style peak of collective hysteria. It accelerates and climbs in a similar way. Skipping, ambling, like losing your balance running down a rocky trail and the best option is just to accelerate.
A little introductory drone fizz brings us into the swamp sunset of Spelled All Wrong. The first track that doesn’t beat you ruthlessly over the head with choral intensity, and instead expands over a map, allowing a horizon to bloom into view, maybe because you’re rising in a cold singular balloon. It’s an intensely dynamic and heavy song but it feels like a lullaby, in comparison with the manic speeds on either side of it.
It occurs to me around this point that there is a lot of sadness in this album. I register a melancholic quality to even the most energetic tracks on LSD. Even the faster tracks all feel tense, anxious, or vulnerable in some way. (I’d say the only real moments of unburdened, joyful playfulness come in later, in Skating.) Here, for a moment, things fully slow down and become overtly sad. The texture brings to mind Spell With A Shell, but with a tone that evokes matured reflections on tragedy rather than infantile demands for impossible outcomes.
It’s a maze of layers of grief: brittle nails, feathery, liquid, brick. Spooky, gentle, tragic, dreamy. They’ve gently foregrounded some blubbering dream-language, and surround this thread with plaid stripes of differing thicknesses, angles, colors. They leave enough space to let me get lost in the golden buzz, the autumn sunset with dead cypress silouhettes, the twisting cycle of central melodies.
Spelled All Wrong winds down gently, subtracting its beautiful singular elements, one by one subtracting the droning, the chimes, the heavy-velvet-quilt-folds melody, until only a small, simple, gentle little cycle of acoustic guitar remains. Its smallness and delicateness is starkly different than anything in the first four tracks: we’ve explored so many spatial scales already, and we’re not even a third of the way through the album.
And…
Before we get to sample the brisk, indulgent playfulness of Skating, there is also a (significantly more evil) playfulness–or at least a sort of ruthlessly silly spirit–to the gleeful, perverse sixth track, By Numbers.
I know this is a kind of cliche: I’ve read that in some era of medieval church music, confusing polyrhythms (and certain dissonant note intervals) were understood as literally evil, products of hell. By Numbers is the first song I’ve ever heard that could convince me there’s something real in this thesis.
By Numbers. It has some of the same triumphant proggy goofyness of tunes like pro-wrestling-worthy artifact T.V.T.V., crossed with the vapid, relentless, self-perpetuating rotational momentum of something like a square dance.
But, in spite of its upbeat glee, By Numbers feels… demonic. By Numbers feels like watching a child rip wings off butterflies: innocent, curious, hyperactive sadism. Burning a car. Smashing a window. Shooting a healthcare executive in broad daylight. Seductive, simple, friendly acts of destruction. Consequences and context and rationales aside, there is, irrationally, something disturbingly good-natured in play. By Numbers isn’t trying to hurt anybody… it’s just trying to do its thing.
Actually, By Numbers had such an extreme effect on me that further words won’t cover it (… another, stranger angle of “engagement” is forthcoming). I’ll only say that when this track came on, I, at work, was mopping the floor–and four minutes later I came to, in an actual cold sweat, realizing my amnesia-bewitched, pain-saturated body had turned off its mind and was doing stuff you definitely can’t do at work.
Drummer Bob Leith groans with exhaustion and presumably collapses into a coma; The Blue And Buff bounces like a gross puppy sweetly into its moment. Its upbeat poppy warmth feels harsh and thoughtfully abrasive on the tail of By Numbers. Bop bop ba bop, bop bop ba bop. Bugs Bunny has knocked you out with an enormous mallet, and, moments later, awakens you, strumming a ukelele and warbling obnoxious romantic tropes directly into your ear. Except, it’s Cardiacs, so the garbled words also make you wonder if you’re having a stroke. It hurts. Your head hurts. Then, the rest of his band materializes out of nowhere, and whisks you into a complex ballroom dance scenario. They don’t care that you have a concussion and there’s no way out of it.
The Blue and Buff is the only song to date about which my daughter has quietly remarked, “I like this one,” which kind of surprised me. Thinking it over, it makes sense; she’s down with Sea Nymphs, and this sounds something like one of the poppier Sea Nymphs songs but extremely beefed up, injected with Cardiacs-grade textural variety, a maze of barbed wire, a climbing, golden proggy labyrinth. My favorite moment is when a ghost chuckles quietly about halfway through–gives me chills.
It lands like a sort of fable about something evil happening, but presented with bubbly innocence of, yes, word salad. There’s a sad tone behind the babytalk and behind the bright, explosive instrumental sections, even though it ends with a moment of modest triumph.
I’ve already seen Skating described as “probably the most batshit thing Tim ever wrote,” but personally I’d give that title to any of several other contenders. I get why people have made this remark, though. Skating really does go all over the map, living up to the Cardiacs trope “more ideas in one song than most artists have in their whole careers.” But, there’s a pleasantly coherent throughline. Here: you could approximate Skating if you imagined The Duck and Roger the Horse, only if it were tonally and lyrically ‘about’ pleasant memories of ice skating (rather than being ‘about’ dead animals circa World War I?) and drawn mainly from 1960s aesthetic clusters (rather than those from, say, the 1860s).
The mania never lets up; even the pauses and negative space feel springloaded with inevitable velocities. An exciting, freestanding whopper of a prog section hits about 2/3 of the way through. I laugh out loud so many times listening to Skating (and so did my daughter). It’s got elevator music. It’s got coked-out bursts of freefloating optimism. It’s got a splendid sort of collage, adorned with all kinds of treats, what can only be called musical jokes. Fussy outbursts. Being tickled. Sea Nymphs and Sing to God referents. Posthumous narration, sensual private comments, even wipeout. Geez.
The thing skates like crazy until it finally runs itself into a wall of exhaustion.
And now maybe we’re all tuckered out. Overtly melancholic again, Breed could fly under the radar, at 3:11 between two longer, higher-energy tracks. The trickling, spraying meltwater of Skating has its viscosity lowered to a molasses crawl. Probably the lowest viscosity we’ve handled yet. And it’s a little sticky, too.
The sad, deflated, lullaby-like atmosphere didn’t make much of an impression on me until the other day when I was listening to it while watching ducks viciously bite each other, on a frozen pond. Something clicked. The coldness and discomfort encase some visceral connective urge. But it doesn’t seem to be a human one.
Then, Volob is the only track I don’t yet “enjoy”, or at least, I’ve only “enjoyed” it when I was so nearly asleep that the words were blissfully unintelligible. It comes on again as I drive home from work and I’m painfully annoyed by its direct verbal emotionality. (But, I rationalize, such was also the case with Signs on the album Guns–eventually, after what I think was over a year, it hit home and I had to pull over and weep in my car. I’m not there yet with Volob but at this point I trust them. Their world is varied and rich enough that I’m willing to let myself be challenged by uncomfortably raw lyricality–normally something I can’t tolerate. So I keep listening.)
It’s probably obvious by now that I’m less interested in lyrics or what things are ‘about’ than I am in styles, textures and environments. I’m a hard sell on lyrics: IMO they should just be there to give the voice some way to participate, but they all too often become disruptive and distracting. Usually this happens because the lyrics start making arguments and points, or, worst of all, storytelling. Thankfully, a good percentage of Cardiacs lyrics are either ‘about’ the ocean… Or they are ‘about’ animals. To flesh it out a little, there’s a lot about being animals, or being animalistic, or being inanimate, or being in the ocean. (Becoming-animal, becoming-intense…) To me, this is the good stuff. Keep it simple. I am a stupidosexual. I want to leave personhood behind, not be invited (or pressured) into an ‘identification’ dynamic. So that’s the barrier for me with Volob even though the electrified junglegym that structures the rhythm/melody has many points of interest. The pulse is compelling, the reversals of gravity, the moments where it falls through open spaces. Like watching squirrels play in an elevator shaft.
As if they knew I was tired of voices talking, the next track is an instrumental. Busty Beez has some sort of lore about it already where it was a ‘lost manuscript thought irrecoverable for several years’ type of thing. It doesn’t need to be something like this, but I’ll take it. It does convincingly sound like something discovered on waterlogged sheet music in a sealed chest in a sunken ship.
Busty Beez takes its time coming into focus. There’s so much to take in; no need to rush. Plenty of time to explore the plants and insects. The brain-harming 27th dimension shapes. The twisting forces of compressive or expansive gravity in a foreign universe where it functions differently. Stars mating over millenia. Or insects mating. It brings to mind the music playing over a documentary montage of snails mating that I saw as a kid. Slow, slimy, uncanny, unrecognizable and euphoric.
To say it’s dream-music isn’t enough. Do you ever wake up in the morning with a song in your mind? Or, falling asleep, get given something fully-formed and wordless like this? In the vein of Wireless, Busty Beez is a slowly-unfolding a liminal process that cuts the double album in half. You wander for months through the minotaur’s cavernous maze, maybe, repeatedly thinking you’ve found your way, only to realize you have to double back several more times. The mischievous patterns subvert your sense of navigation over and over… If you’re patient, the reward is finding your way back out.
And ouch! The sun is a little too bright when we get out.
In a 2005 solo show, Tim Smith, preparing to play To Go Off And Things, rambles: “We’re talking about eyes. Again, night after night it’s really just to see it, what they do, it looks lovely, look at all this, when you look at, just, it looks, a bit strange really, you’re all lovely tonight, you look fluffy, with your beautiful eyes… Which makes it stink of eyes in here, sort of… You’re all lovely, look, look at how beautiful you are.. Sorry, sorry…”
A musician friend listened to Lovely Eyes and uttered the disparaging phrase “death cab for cutie”. It HURTS, but I have to admit I know what she means. The melodies are great, but. This is an urgent, sweaty, even angsty pop song. It has an adolescent spirit in a middle aged execution and the result makes me deeply uncomfortable. To revisit some of what I wrote in August about Woodeneye, Cardiacs are always doing this shit to me: making me listen to and, worse, enjoy things that should bother and repel me. There are Cardiacs tracks all but indistinguishable from musical theater; there’s the most embarassing imaginable spread of old man alt rock; there are countless hair metal moments and prog is basically the backbone of a huge portion of their catalogue; even the damn Beatles are lurking in the sound from time to time–my absolute most hated quality of all. (Sorry, Mom!)
Lovely Eyes holds us hostage for a few minutes inside things many of us prefer not to inhabit. The uncomfortably frantic energy whines, climbs, overloads itself with layers and ultimately becomes dramatically dissonant. It crashes out way too melodically. It’s affecting, in a way that I find largely unpleasant, like licking a gross thing… Finally, we’re freed from the grip of this mortifyingly emo-adjacent outburst by the patient clicking of a familiar tambourine pattern.
It starts off cool. As in Busty Beez, there’s no need to rush fate.
Ditzy Scene is an example of a Cardiacs work that fully devotes itself, gives itself over to the aesthetic of near-institutional formality. For decades, Cardiacs have always been willing to play with a quality of institutionality in a way that might be stomach-turning to people looking for fun; Ditzy Scene shamelessly takes us there. For 7 minutes, we become proud members of some vine-covered british insane asylum who sing this song every morning in a mandatory assembly of inpatients. We’re on the deck of a gloomy ship, doing a naval awards ceremony for a patriotic octopus. Part national anthem, part classic-rock-B-side, part manson-ey cult choral warble, I’ve rarely found any other music similar to this. Again, my closest analogy would be J.A. Seazer’s psychedelic dirge Missing Link.
The LSD version of Ditzy Scene (with horns and strings) feels indulgent and warm where the EP version felt sparse. It’s nice to hear all the previously-inaudible suggested melodies articulated by the decadent horns: like a lot of subtextual shapes being brought proudly to the forefront. It’s nice to feel invited to partake in a sinister ritual of cosmic devotion. In both recordings of it, I find Ditzy Scene so orderly that it becomes refreshingly sinister.
One of this album’s challenges, for me, is learning to tolerate Mike Vennart’s slithery clear voice. The smoothness has a certain quality that automatically ejects me from my comfort zone. It’s one of the factors in how the texture of track #14 Downup (due to the instrumentation? the mixing? the mode?) presents, regrettably, as in Woodeneye, the same surface as some utterly shitty genX alt-rock. Sorry guys… We’re back in the tattoo shop, the walgreens. A man is singing wistfully about his feelings but he can also ROCK! No portal unexplored… At the same time, it’s built around beautiful interlocking melodies, intricate braided overlaps. Some of them remind me of Sea Nymphs gem Heaven Haven. It’s both superficially intolerable and substantially touching–and the effect is amplified by how much we long to hear Tim’s rougher voice, how easily we can imagine it. It’s so close but it’s out of reach.
Then we go to a train station waiting room where we’ll be catching a train as a means of time travel. You can hear the train coming through the tunnel. Our nervous, anticipatory energy for the journey is perfectly reflected in A Roll From A Dirty Place. This is a funny, simple, lightly nostalgic song, one of the most straightforward and friendly tracks on LSD. There’s anxiety, regret and resigned optimism. It’s light and tight, but substantial.
Though it’s a very different type of song, the closest Cardiacs analogy is probably Faster Than Snakes With A Ball And A Chain: there are some similar frills, choral confusion and carefully compartmentalized micro-environments. It also reminds me a bit of a gentle little track near the end of Guns that doesn’t get a lot of attention (Song Of A Dead Past). And, as far as I’m concerned, the mixing of A Roll From A Dirty Place is exquisite: bright and precise so that every element gets to be totally distinct in texture.
Something to the recording quality of this album version of Made All Up sounds intentionally muted. In contrast to the EP version, and to the song immediately before it, this track sounds and feels like you’re up close inside of it, as if my head’s stuck inside a box full of the song; the outside world resonates with the sound, but is muffled. It blasts in highlighter-yellow vividness, directly through the cells of my skull; by contrast, the EP version articulated the same vaulted church ceilings as Gen. I guess I’m still more obsessed with the EP version of this song, one of my lifetime’s most beloved pieces of music which affected me so intensely on its own.
To me, Made All Up is more anthemic than almost any other Cardiacs song. Diabolical, similarly “religious” in tone as Gen, I find its placement on the album satisfying and fitting. The little cycle of odd pauses and key shifts are consummate Cardiacs. I really like how the keyboard has the last word.
To dare to listen to the last song on LSD, I had to face a surprisingly sharp and indeterminate fear. This fear was based in the intuition that nothing could ever match the irradiating sensitivity of (rumored as the original intended closer to LSD) Vermin Mangle.
Vermin Mangle is a powerful song. It had an effect on me in the top handful of affecting pieces of music I’ve ever heard. When Woodeneye was released, I wrote already about how, like many people, I could not help preemptively feeling nervous about its absence on LSD. I should have trusted them; I’ll readily admit that Pet Fezant is the most stunning possible closer for this album.
When expectations are built up this much, there’s perhaps only one functional approach to close out the album, and this track nails it. In its maddening simplicity, Pet Fezant vaporizes all my closest-held landmarks, orientations, expectations. The deceptively straightforward, once again musically ‘demonic’, lilting melody descends like a fog of nitrus around the impulse to evaluate things rationally, muffles everything, and frees me. All the baggage burns up in an instant. I become and the world becomes weightless smoke. We slow down enough to feel how smoke twists and dissipates.
Over its 7+ minutes the repetitive cycle of chord changes always set just off to the side of where I anticipate them lead me further and further away from anything else mattering. It’s an intimate, dazzling lucid dream unto itself. The counterpoint bass line is the bafflingly delicate, understated, rambling, never stopping, gliding along reassuringly, dense skeletal structure underneath the song. The gentle but relentless pulse brings all of it–this entire foreign universe–back to the tiny splashes of rolling ocean water where it hits the shore. So powerful that it’s almost impossible to notice, I clearly hear it cycling, believably, forever, at a sort of decadent medieval feast in another universe. The particularly seagull-ey Kavus Torabi guitar solo soars over the foggy beach, searching for something.
In daylight I realize that Pet Fezant is middle-of-the-road regular psychedelia in that it sounds like fricken “Feathers”; in daylight I realize that it really annoys me and jilts my dignity to be utterly emotionally struck by anything that can be said “sounds like Feathers”. But I can’t care anymore. I’ve been persuaded to travel somewhere totally unrecognizable, and look at a landscape so bafflingly beautiful, that I can’t be bothered to evaluate what the map says.
At this point, lost in Pet Fezant, for all I fucking care, I could be in walmart looking intently at the graphic design of a sack of cat food, getting completely lost in the undulating stripes on the stock photo of an adult tabby male, weeping, totally astonished and moved. I wouldn’t care who laughs at me, as long as they let me keep staring at these sights. As long as they don’t call for security and have me escorted out of the building. I won’t bother anybody. I won’t threaten any sort of status-quo anywhere. I quite honestly just want to feel these little cycling patterns ripple through me, forever. Nothing else matters.
LSD indeed.
In conclusion…
As I mentioned, you cannot make use of the subtle knife except by first letting it slice off some of your fingers. I think people don’t register enough the irrecoverable time and energy that artists slice out of themselves in order to use that power. And why? So that they can terminally neglect their “real” circumstances (including their own physical bodies) and unethically enable us to do the same. Also: if you pass through one of the subtle knife’s sliced windows into another world, you are irradiated by ultraviolet or gamma ray-type damage. The distance from your home world, or the neglect of it, is a radioactive strain on matter. It slowly makes you sick and kills you.
LSD is a sort of casket brimming with treasure, a braid of mismatched scraps that somehow make a terrifyingly strong cable, a sliced-open portal to a sparkling, twisting, indeterminate dimension where physical laws are constructed out of cycles of grief and relief. LSD has made me believe that its world, all of these environments, these foreign realities with ironic and magnificent qualities, like Oz, always already existed. The world of LSD was always there–independent of Cardiacs, but they sliced their fingers off so that they could open up a window into it, and did us the favor of allowing us to visit.
When we do visit, it might irradiate us and undermine the possibility that our time and energy will be devoted to our home reality. It might steal our lives from us. Music can cause physical pain. Music can make you sick. Music can be so intense that it kills or immiserates the people who make it, who write it, who play it. But my home world also causes me physical pain and makes me sick. It tortures people I love and people I’ll never meet, both alike. It hacks away at the will to survive.
That’s why I’m willing to get sick, get lost, or suffer if it means I can have a chance of going through one of these windows. The result will definitely not be a happy ending, but it will be astonishing and phenomenal.
