CARDIACS - Faster Than Snakes with a Ball and Chain | INTO THE MUSIC REACTION | KoFi Request
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ส.ค. 2024
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TODAY'S VIDEO: Into the Music Reaction/Review - “Faster Than Snakes with a Ball and Chain" - by Cardiacs
Original Video: • Cardiacs - Faster Than...
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Yes,they can play… phenomenal live
You are experiencing what all CARDIACS fans have, an EPIPHANY no less!!!
Really loving the plunge I've been taking into the Pond! - Greg
Tim's lyrics are phenomenal. I've had the pleasure of watching CARDIACS perform many many times, and his delivery was always nothing short of brilliant.
I understand not falling in love with this one initially. Took me a few listens too. Ah well.
To answer a few of your questions:
1. This song is actually exclusive to the Greatest Hits album, a special bonus to make the rest of the album worth buying for someone who already has everything else.
2. The vocalist was Sharron Fortnam née Saddington. She was a guest vocalist on a few Cardiacs songs around this time, and also shared a band with a couple other Cardiacs members.
3. The person you're thinking of is Sarah, who was only very briefly married to Tim. Sarah was the band's saxophonist for a long period of time, and still contributed to Tim's music long after they were no longer married.
4. The lyrics get more confusing the later into the band's discography you go. This was one of their last released songs, so it only makes sense that it doesn't make sense.
Hope this info is helpful to you, and I do hope you continue to share your journey with this band with us, as it's really been such a treat to see. You have an absolutely lovely channel here, and your discussions of the tracks are always great too. Keep it up!
"It makes sense that it doesn't make sense" - I couldn't have put it better. IIRC a lot of Tim's later lyrics were taken from a badly translated Portuguese phrasebook!
@@antlermagick Ah yes. Someone's even put together an interesting compilation of them lyrics here on you tube. English as she is spoke I believe?
I was looking at the back cover of Greatest Hits on discogs recently and noticed it said this song is "from the forthcoming album with 'no title yet'" so that first point might not be entirely right. At least not forever.
@@Eylaj Yeah they were planning to release an album around 2002-2003 but it never came to fruition.
They scrapped it and started working on LSD, which also hasn't been released... but a little birdy tells me it's actively being worked on by Kavus.
@@antlermagick From what I know the scrapped album is still only a rumour. Also yeah we've been keeping up do date with these movements on the discord.
You mentioned Beethoven/Bach having music in their heads and had to get into the studio. From what I’ve heard, that’s exactly what Tim Smith was like, waking in the middle of the night and having to write his ideas down. Apparently there’s loads more music that he’s written than has ever been recorded.
His connection with classical composers goes as far as him receiving an honorary Doctorate in Musical Composition by The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Not bad for someone who describes his music and “Just tunes”.
Thanks for taking a look at this one! I understand not fully connecting with it right away, it was a bit of an ask from me!
One of the reasons I asked for this one was that nobody else on TH-cam has listened to it yet. You're a pioneer!
I believe this track was going to be included on an album around 2002 which never came to fruition, so they put it onto their Greatest Hits album as a little bonus for the fans. The stuff from the album "Guns" is in a similar vein to this song.
On another note, I sent this song to my friend a few months ago, and all he said was "This is ADHD music"
This song is an absolute piledriver, a juggernaut. It's often overwhelming, and I completely understand why you felt like it was mostly all over the place, with a very loose structure and minimal repetitions of melodies/motifs etc. However, if you end up giving it subsequent listens, you will discover this tune to actually be very structured, with several themes/motifs that come back numerous times and end up really grounding the song. That's not something one would be likely to pick up on the first listen, or twelfth...so, not trying to say "You're wrong!" Not at all, mate. Tim regularly condensed legitimate epics into 3 to 5 minute tunes, and they do require effort. I love these reactions. Keep it up!
Totall agree, i remember being lukewarm on this tune when i first heard it but i went back about a week later and something about it just clicked...it's up there with the best of the cardiacs catalogue (which is, lets be real, every song).
I think the bass (played by Jon Poole, I see below - he's the bassist for the prog rock band Lifelines today, BTW) is being played in "Tim Smith style". If you get round to Tim's *Sea Nymphs* stuff one day (a band he did more stripped down music in, with his then wife, Cardiacs saxophonist, Sarah, and the keyboard player of the first iteration of Cardiacs, William D. Drake - who has a fair bit of music on TH-cam you might enjoy, too) you'll hear he brings the bass up to the front of the mix often, and "makes vocalizations" with it - the unusual techniques you hear here. "Melodic bass", maybe?
As for the lyrics, I know that somewhere near the end, while they were working on the Special Garage Concerts and the media that went with that, the whole band at one point went over The Channel to France to go to a *Magma* concert, so that band was definitely on Tim's radar, at least; and Magma has lyrics in a language they invented, called Kobaian, which is really just made up of speech sounds that intuitively go nicely with the music. (There are people who can write you something in the language, but the sounds came first, and the meanings, later.) So Time might have been influenced by Magma with his later lyrics, which are often deliberately nonsensical. (He makes extensive use of Mark Twain's favourite English phrase book, _English as She is Spoke_ which was fraudulently sold to ninteteenth century Brazilians, to help them sound "more like a native" when speaking English. Mark Twain loved it because it was so absurd and hilarious.) There are some TH-cam videos (I don't have bookmarks, unfortunately) that reveal some of Tim's lyrical sources for some of the more obscure songs. Sometimes there's method in the madness, and sometimes his intention isn't to write the listener a little story or essay.
You might find if you give this song the occasional try that one day the best of it will come through to you. I know I took a very long time before I started to really hear it. That's the thing with this level of originality: Sometimes there are very few bearings a listener brings in that help, so you have to understand some of his songs almost entirely on their own terms. (I think he normally tried to make good old hummable tunes, but sometimes he got the weird ideas in his head. In time, the strange songs become the best ones - as with many bands). It would definitely be a good idea to give it a listen on a day when you're not as tired as this one. (Same goes for Tarred and Feathered. Give it some time to brew, and it starts to get better and better all the time. Once you've listened once, you already have some of the references you'll need next time.)
So the disconnected sound you hear at times is Jim Smith's bass guitar. This is at front and centre in the mix for the two verses (of sorts). There is a young guy on TH-cam who did a bass cover of this song. Please watch this as you will truly understand what a virtuosic bass line this is. Up there with Geddy Lee at his best. Insane playing. Also the guitar part midway in the song was lifted by #Radiohead #cardiacs to create the song 'Just'. As we all say, Tim Smith songs have more ideas in them than most bands entire albums. #RIPtimsmith #pondies #cardiacsmusic
A correction, Just came out before Faster Than Snakes, but neither of them invented that guitar part. It's called the diminished scale and it's been around since at least the early 1900s. It's as silly as saying the major scale was ripped off. Hope this correction doesn't come off abrasive, I've just gotten a bit tired of seeing people say such an extremely common scale was invented by Radiohead or invented by Tim Smith.
@@-100-percent A correction. Tim wrote Faster than Snakes with a ball and a chain in 1984. Kavus Torabi said so on an extended interview he gave some years ago now. I had the print version of this and used to show it to those idiotic Radiohead fans who made the same incorrect statement you did above. #facts
@@monkeyhouse1672 Okay, first, when the song was written doesn't matter, as it's impossible for Radiohead to "rip off" a song that hadn't been released. You can't rip off something you've never heard. But all of this is beside the main point, which is that neither artist ripped this off from anyone. It's a stock scale. The diminished scale even predates the birth of any member of those bands. I'm not trying to be confrontational here or start an argument, our Pond must be a place of peace and love.
Also the comment about the scale. Every note exists on a scale. Most progressions and series of notes follow each other on a certain scale. So this renders your point moot.
@@monkeyhouse1672 I think you're misunderstanding my point. Neither riff is a riff. They are playing verbatim the notes of the scale in order.
I had a very similar reaction to this song initially. It took its time to reveal itself to me, but was very rewarding once it did (as is all of Tim's stuff). Keep up the good work :)
Hi Greg, Chinners here again . . . The Greatest Hits album was basically a sample type production that had album tracks rather than single releases . . . 'Is This The Life' was probably their biggest 'hit' that was a gateway for many who either slammed that gate shut upon hearing their other material or proceeded and persevered to become hooked for life . . . is this the life?