King Cardiac

King Cardiac drapes heartfelt songwriting in a technicolour dream coat of unbridled horns and moody rhythms.

The genre bending ensemble features singer-songwriter and guitarist Gabriel DeSantis uniting with Toronto heavyweights; Paul Metcalfe, Sam Petite, Tom Richards, Lowell Whitty and Alan Zemaitis to explore matters that rule the heart with hard grooves and brooding vibes.

For their debut record “Bloodlines,” the band settled into “The Rooster Studio” run by Don Kerr (Bahamas, Ron Sexsmith) 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 (Feist, Lido Pimienta, Andy Shauf).

The 9 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.”