We’re All About All Things Cardinal Here…
Still remember making a trip from St. Louis to Columbia in Missouri back around 1994 or so and stopping off at one of my favorite record haunts of that day, a place called Whizz Records. My old college buddy Jeff Breeze was working there, and was always good for hepping me on musics I was missing out on (I should mention that from about 1992 to 1993 I went completely “dark” on music by dint of no longer having much access to anything but some freelance promotion I was working with at the time; if we weren’t working it, I didn’t know it, musically.)
Jeff practically slapped me upside the head with a CD by a band called Cardinal, which I bought, and which turned out to be two dudes named Eric Matthews and Richard Davies. Cardinal was great–a dazzling disc of orchestrated chamber pop that was a year or two before that subgenre would really take off again.
Sadly, messrs Matthews and Davies stopped getting along shortly after the CD came out and both went solo. Matthews may have had the more celebrated solo career, but it was always the music of Davies that I preferred (the Telegraph album is particularly great.) I still listen to that only Cardinal album a bunch to this day, as it really holds up brilliantly.
And so tonight comes the news (hat tip to my good friend Roberta Moore Patterson) that these two fellows have put differences aside and there’ll be a new Cardinal album coming out in January of 2012 on UK label Fire. Even better–there’s a new song you can listen to right now. Those who have heard the record (I haven’t yet) call it a seamless return to where these guys were back in 1994. I certainly hope so. Really digging this first taste.
Popnarcotic 