A duo formed by The Moles’ Richard Davies, after that group had dissolved in New York, and musician-arranger Eric Matthews, Cardinal was a curious proposition in the mid-nineties, their classicist leanings out-of-step with most everything going on in popular music at the time. The careful, poised arrangements that Matthews used to buttress Davies’s arcane, mysterious songwriting gave the latter grandeur while preserving its idiosyncrasy, and the melodies and harmonies are lovely without being cloying or predictable. A cover of “Singing To The Sunshine”, originally by sixties psych-folk group Mortimer, gives a good indication of where the duo’s heads were at – not chamber-pop or orch-pop, really, but interested in popular music’s artful byways.