Triumphant, uncompromising, unfettered, heroic, back with a new bang.

Cardiacs come with a backstory that would take pages, not paragraphs, to summarise.  And this single, on its own, comes with a backstory worthy of binge watched documentary series. If you are familiar in any way with Cardiacs, and you were fairly out of the loop, just finding out this exists might floor you. You’d know that the bandleader, Tim Smith, almost finished a double album titled LSD and was just about to release the first in a series of singles from it when he collapsed in London on the way home from a My Bloody Valentine gig, suffering a series of strokes that left him with the terrifying and painful condition dystonia, unable to speak and barely able to move, needing constant full time care.  That was in 2008, and nobody wanted to talk about albums and singles when Tim’s fight for care and survival was everything.  Over the following twelve years, a support system made up of creatives and carers enabled Tim to slowly emerge back into a sort of public, able to attend concerts arranged for him, being able to visit his home studio and direct others to work on his unreleased Sea Nymphs album as well as much work on LSD, including bringing in new vocalists to add the voice he’d lost.

After Tim passed away suddenly in the summer of 2020, in all the shock and grief, a fierce determination to finish his work was everything.  Of course it was. In the five years since he left, Cardiacs fan base has grown exponentially.  The greatest barrier to Cardiacs being the worldwide phenomena they should have been was always the gatekeepers of a music industry that didn’t know how to describe them, and the gates are gone.  They’re the undiscovered reaction video jaw dropper on YouTube, appreciated by scholarly musicologists as much as people in search of exhilaration and emotion in music.  And once drawn by their mesmerising back catalogue of over a dozen studio albums, the new fans are asking… will we ever hear anything from LSD?

No, nothing, not even leaked from a very strict Alphabet Business Concern… until now

Woodeneye comes at you with a freshness and directness that might surprise those who’d only read about how complex and weird and ‘difficult’ and obtuse Cardiacs were.  It doesn’t surprise anyone familiar with them.  This is crisp and new wavey and somehow timeless, instantly stimulating to dance, mosh, pogo, whatever until it goes off and things and becomes utterly, unstoppably Cardiacs in nature.  Some may attempt to copy, only Cardiacs do it right.  The vocalists, on this single at least,  include Kavus Torabi, Rose Kemp and Mike Vennart, a hint of the work that’s been going on over the last few years to save Tim’s vision for the album.  The song fizzes with energy, a triumphant, lively blast, a blast of life.

The album comes with a cover that will mean everything to anyone who was lucky enough to experience Tim Smith – his delight in the magic of ordinary things elevated to extraordinary, his beady eye for absurd beauty, his huge, huge smile, that *look* when he saw something and was about to make a throwaway comment that would make you both cry with laughter and haunt you the rest of your life.  There is no explaining it. But it was a painting Tim stumbled across and ‘got’ and had on his wall, and now it’s going to be on the cover of LSD and there’s absolutely no reasoning to describe why it’s perfect. I could feebly attempt to say it punctures the pomposity of rock or something but that it’s not a joke, but it’s hilarious. And beauty.
aaah fck it just listen. (m)

I was thinking the other day about the three singles we had planed to release and how we only got a third of the way through hatching that plan before, well you know what happened to Cardiacs leader (of the starry skies) Tim Smith, it has been rather well documented. We think about it rather a lot actually, even though the Ditzy Scene single came out way way back in that rather different world of 2007, not far off eighteen whole years ago! Back then it was daily or at least weekly conversations, phone calls or e.mails with Tim, plans and plots and general chewing the fat about music in general and have you heard this and what do you think of that and you should check out this band I saw last night, Tim did quietly check out a lot of bands and can you explain football to me, i was in a pub and everyone was shouting? He wanted to get it but just couldn’t, all these chats and non stop questions and bits of information he wanted to share, chats that were taken for granted (e.mails that mostly weren’t even kept). And then, well you know what happened next, Tim got seriously ill, the other two singles that were to follow Ditzy Scene were put on hold and the plan went up on the shelf. Fast forward eighteen years, I haven’t really spoken to anyone in the Cardiacs camp since Tim got ill, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, a whole new set of people involved and, hang on, here come the song, they just put it up on line      

That’s a yappy start, a fast start, faster than snakes with a ball and chain (far more depth than that one though, there is lots here, those layers), and then a holy ghost and a bomb (did it go off in Wardour Street?), and there’s that bit, you know, that bit and sorry I can’t be here, and holy ghost to kiss what? I can’t afford to share the pleasure or the treasure, the ditzy thing it is, it does sound like a rather ditzy scene if does sound like where we left off and here we are a whole 18 years and here it is there is a loop then i was spun out of it ages, I don’t know, but this does sound like it was always going to be the next single and this really really really is picking up where it all left off. Only it isn’t, it never could be and I tell you all this because it is (very) personal, it is emotional, it is a moment never to repeated, the first bite (besides the Ditzy Scene tracks that I assume are on the album? Ah yes, there’s the track listing, there they all are), the first bit of the long lost never finished until now album. A first listen has always been emotional but this is is extra so, the album Tim was making when he got ill, the album that he guided and stretched and pulled and poked while he was too ill to do anything else, the album that has been rather lovingly completed after the Leader of The Starry Skies left us and oh that’s a good bit, that almost trademark gear change thing that they did in later times, that thing they did (and do) so so well, it could only be them, all the finger prints are here. It is all here, the urgency, the swimming against the tide, the choir of sounds and the layers, oh the layers, the pleasure, the treasure and it does fall down at your feet and the great big smile of it all… (s)          

“The first of three singles and your first chance to dip a toe into the deep, beautiful sparkling pool on the shoreline of the forthcoming album LSD, in Itself a huge and as yet undiscovered ocean of delights but as dangerous as any sea in her moods! It’s been a long time coming, so strip off and dive in!”  

Find the single on Bandcamp

And here comes the album and the details and the song titles and the rest of it on Bandcamp