In the five years since we sadly lost Cardiacs leader Tim Smith at age 59, surviving members and the band’s label Alphabet Business Concern shared a previously unreleased song with the world and finally put the Cardiacs discography on streaming services, and now they revealed in an interview with Sean Kitching for The Quietus that an entire posthumous album is coming.
It’s called LSD and it’s due out later this year–exactly release date TBA. Tim’s brother and bandmate Jim Smith had been working on finishing it after Tim’s passing, as he explains in the interview:
[Finishing LSD has] been a true labour of love. People were saying to me, when’s it coming out? You’ve only got a bit of singing or a bit of mixing to do? But it wasn’t. Tim had done practically zero vocals for it. I think there’s three tracks that he’d done guide vocals for and so we had to make the best of that. But first of all, we had to rebuild the studio completely, because it had been sitting there for fifteen years, going to pot and nothing was working. I had to strip all of that out, bin the desk, get a new desk in, wire it all up. Then we started on it. It’s been two years of work so far. Pretty constant. It’s mixed. It needs mastering. It sounds really good to be honest. It’s kind of floating somewhere between Sing to God and Guns, with lots of call backs to Little Man and a House in there as well. It has elements of all of the stuff that we’ve done altogether really. […] This is a real out of the ashes. I’m really, really proud of it.
Jim also mentions that he’s hoping to have surviving members of Cardiacs tour behind the album as well, but he’s “not scheduling anything as yet until as and when [he] can speak to everyone. It’s gonna be really hard to nail people down to do it.”
The interview also took place to help promote Aaron Tanner / Melodic Virtue’s new book Cardiacs: A Big Book and a Band and the Whole World, a book of “rare and unseen photos, artwork, and other ephemera that will captivate long-time fans and newcomers alike” with an introduction by Napalm Death’s Shane Embury and words from Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More), Billy Gould (Faith No More), Todd Sucherman (Styx), Boff Whalley and Dunstan Bruce (Chumbawamba), Mike Keneally (The Zappa Band), Joanna Wang, Martin Atkins (Public Image Ltd), Rob Crow (Pinback), Amon Tobin, Rhodri Marsden (Scritti Politti), Charlie Harper (U.K. Subs), Ego Plum, Pitchshifter, Dan Mongrain (Voivod), Paul Masvidal (Cynic, Death), J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus) and more. The book also comes with a 7″ featuring the previously unreleased track “Aukamakic/Dead Mouse” from the sessions for 1979’s Cardiac Arrest E.P., along with “Faster Than Snakes with a Ball and a Chain,” which was originally intended for 1999’s Guns but not released until 2002’s Greatest Hits album (and has never previously appeared on vinyl).
Jim Smith told The Quietus that the book came about after Pinback’s Rob Crow began working on a film about Cardiacs pre-pandemic. “Rob came over with Aaron [Tanner of Melodic Virtue] when they scanned all the photographs,” Jim says. “I had the final say, as the final buffer for stuff I didn’t want to be in it. They were doing a pretty deep dig.”
The book also has the support of The Alphabet Business Concern, whose Sharron Fortnam said, “It was an unusual move for The Alphabet Business Concern to allow someone from ‘the outside’ access to the archive but, having seen Aaron’s previous work for The Residents [and also Butthole Surfers], we knew the book would be artistically impressive. The opportunity to collaborate in this way seemed like a fitting summation of what has gone before and it’s good to see things from someone else’s perspective, sometimes, too. Having said that, I’m not sure we expected it to be quite so good! It’s a work of art.”
Pick up the book and see some previews of it here, and stay tuned for more on LSD.
“Aukamakic/Dead Mouse” is also now streaming. Check it out: