Some bands have to wait years or even decades to be fully appreciated. The Wake were built that way from the start. The Glasgow band can claim the unique distinction of recording for two of the preeminent British indie labels of the late 20th century, Factory and Sarah. Fittingly, their best music mixes nervously funky post-punk with wispy bedroom synth-pop. But of course, that combination was hardly obvious at the time, and it's easy to see how in an earlier media environment, the Wake must've sounded like lesser clones of New Order or the Cure.
The Wake will still probably always remain a cult band compared to those groups, but they've proven increasingly influential over the past few years. Stateside indie poppers the Drums have said they came together with "the idea of completely ripping the Wake off." Recently defunct Swedish duo Air France borrowed from the Wake for a song on their 2006 On Trade Winds EP. But leading the Wake revival has been Brooklyn label Captured Tracks, which reissued two of the band's singles for Record Store Day 2011 and has commissioned a handful of cover versions by its roster, whose members generally share the Wake's dreamy melancholy and independent mindset.
Captured Tracks has now lovingly reissued the Wake's 1985 sophomore album-- by some measure their best-- and the non-album tracks from the same era, which are even better. Singer-guitarist Gerard "Caesar" McInulty, who had previously been a member of pre-fame Altered Images, formed the Wake in 1981 with singer-keyboardist Carolyn Allen, drummer Steven Allen, and bassist Joe Donnelly, soon to be replaced by Bobby Gillespie, who would go on to greater fame with the Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream. But 1982 debut album Harmony hewed a bit too clumsily to the Factory line. Gillespie had moved on by the time of all but one of the tracks here, replaced by Alex MacPherson.
Here Comes Everybody holds up as a touchstone for aching, atmospheric synth-pop, all slinky guitars, crisp percussion, textured keyboard, and limber bass. "This is a page from my diary," Caesar begins on "O Pamela", which has since been covered by Nouvelle Vague; with a guitar-and-synth intro that uncannily predicts Tears for Fears' far glossier (and more commercially successful) 1985 hit "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", it could be the diary of more recent artists from Washed Out to Youth Lagoon, too. Nor is the album afraid of taking something schmaltzy-- like the embarrassing Don McLean quote on seven-minute "Melancholy Man", or the jaunty harmonica on heartbroken "World of Her Own"-- and investing it with fragile sincerity. Expansively wispy, this is a record best heard as a whole, a missing evolutionary link between Josef K and the Field Mice.
The most immediate examples of the Wake's legacy, however, and the tracks you'll most likely play for your friends, come on disc two, which collects the group's 7" and 12" releases from 1983 to 1987. The ambiguous 1984 single "Talk About the Past", with its twitchy guitar and splashes of piano by the Durutti Column's Vini Reilly, and 1985's loping contemplation "Of the Matter", with its elegaic vividness ("There's a shadow of a shadow moving in"), are both wonderful. But then so is the entirety of 1987's Something That No One Else Could Bring EP, which includes the luminously catchy "Gruesome Castle", with its proto-chillwave hook: "Arise, arise, and keep up appearances." The only relative duds are the murkily sprawled 1983 B-side "Host", with Gillespie, and the dubby finale "Of the Matter (Version)", which at the very least lets the record end with the original song's epigrammatic closing words: "And when you find me, you will find me alone/ Then we'll walk to your house, walk together, walk home."
Here Comes Everybody and its singles have been reissued before, in 2002 by LTM, but this is their first U.S. release, and their first vinyl pressing since the original Factory records. First available on Record Store Day alongside reissues of albums by Cleaners From Venus and Medicine, the box set I purchased online is simply but carefully packaged, with a 12"x12" booklet of historically significant liner notes by Caesar, lyrics, and photography, plus full sleeves for both records and a 7" featuring Portland-based Captured Tracks band Blouse's spaced-out cover of the Something EP's "Pale Spectre". On the flip is labelmates Craft Spells' complementary "Talk About the Past".
That last song, one almost explicitly referred to on the title track of Air France's Sincerely Yours labelmate the Honeydrips' 2007 Here Comes the Future, sounds especially relevant at a time when being internet-famous is no longer a novelty: "Have you heard the good news/ Everybody is a star/ Have you heard the good news/ Everybody works so hard." It's perhaps no coincidence that the title of Here Comes Everybody, a Finnegans Wake reference that confirmed the Wake's relationship to the James Joyce novel, was also the title of New York University professor Clay Shirky's 2008 book on crowdsourcing and "mass amateurization."
It might not be a surprise, either, that Caesar and Carolyn Allen, after teaming up with the Field Mice and Trembling Blue Stars' Bobby Wratten as the Occasional Keepers, have selected 2012 to reunite for a new album by the Wake, A Light Far Out, which came out in early May on LTM. They might not ever be truly stars, but the time they've worked so hard for is, well, now.
