Cardiacs - Fiery Gun Hand

Can you hear that noise, faithful readers/listeners? That’s the sound of us getting real weird with it this week. Usually, the sort of oddness associated with progressive rock or metal is a few time signature quirks combined with enough weed to make the barista of an Amsterdam café blush. Sometimes, the weirdness Doomsday clock hits two minutes to midnight and we get a more madcap energy, accompanied by the occasional bit of jazz fusion or indecipherable rambling to really put some concerned looks on the faces of the men in white coats. 

Then there’s the Cardiacs. Brothers Tim and Jim Smith, frontrunners in the “who has the fakest-sounding name to give a police officer” awards, spent four decades with a revolving door of musicians, confusing the living daylights out of everyone with their bizarre brand of post-progressive, art rock madness. As aggressive as it was baffling, the Cardiacs won over the hearts and minds of an equally rambunctious cult following – hence the aptly named “cult rock” genre listed on Wikipedia - and wound up just about everyone else. It’s a great, colourful story with an unfortunately tragic end, the band dissolving after Tim Smith was diagnosed with dystonia following multiple illnesses in 2008 that eventually took his life. If you have the time, read into the band and their following, because it’s genuinely wild just how much their supporters showed their love for them – you know, almost like a cult would, surprisingly. 

Whether you see it as visionary, avant-garde tinkering with the folds and fabrics of music itself or as an effort in severe piss-taking, there’s a little bit of something for everyone in our Rock Song of the Week pick this time around. Fiery Gun Hand is almost impressively mental and what it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in pretty much every other way. It’s impossible to deny or even really sum up fully the effect that the late Tim Smith had on the landscape of modern rock – but there’s nothing more telling than the feeling of wanting to join the cult after listening to five minutes of this.