King Cardiac shares a full-length album, Bloodlines, plus a video for their single, “You Got It Bad”
Toronto’s King Cardiac have unveiled their debut record, Bloodlines. The album culminates a BIG year that saw the band put out three singles and showcase at Folk Alliance International, Global Toronto, and the Farms for Change Festival.
The genre-bending ensemble features singer-songwriter and guitarist Gabriel DeSantis uniting with The Heavyweights Brass band members to explore matters that rule the heart with hard grooves and brooding vibes.
For Bloodlines, the band settled into “The Rooster Studio” run by Don Kerr, who engineered and co-produced the record along with DeSantis. It was mastered by Grammy nominee and Juno and Polaris Prize winner Philip Shaw Bova.
The nine tracks offer cinematic vignettes of DeSantis’ time living overseas on a narrowboat on the London canals and his adventures touring his solo set throughout Europe. Tones vary widely between songs; from noir meanderings through the back alleys of Camden on “Stale Melodies” to the fervent and relentless horn lines that punctuate a psychedelic voyage on “Amsterdam” to the surprisingly vulnerable and sincere meditations on ancestry, inheritance, and the human experience on the title track “Bloodlines.”
“The move to London provided a well of experience to draw on for writing the bulk of this record,” says DeSantis. “The intimidation of virtually starting from scratch but at the same time the promise of a clean slate, coupled with new experiences, relationships, sights and sounds all made for good songwriting.”
Accompanying the album release is a music video for the song “You Got It Bad.” It is the fourth music video off the record in a series directed and produced by DeSantis during the pandemic when live performances were shelved.
“You Got It Bad” provides viewers with a stunning black and white journey through London, following a dancing mania contagion as it makes its way through the city. The cinematic imagery compliments guest musician Anh Phung’s stellar flute lines. The whole video was filmed by DeSantis in motion with the dancers Patricia Langa, Anna Preidel, Alex Felton, and Anna Tierney along some of London’s busiest thoroughfares.