The Wake On Our Honeymoon / Give Up 7″ reissue
Before they were Factory-backed, joyless JOY DIVISION/NEW ORDER adherents, and later saccharinely sweet Sarah Records twee-poppers, the 1982 debut recorded offering from Glasgow’s the WAKE was an exercise in anxious art-punk with a streak of youthful naivety, almost like a schoolboy-fronted JOSEF K. “On Our Honeymoon” launches straight into a deliriously loping bassline caught in a gravitational pull somewhere between Peter Hook and Three Imaginary Boys-era CURE, with skittering, disco-flecked drums and scratchy guitar running at odds against paper-thin wallflower vocals; it’s a two-minute rush of spiky, minimalist brilliance that immediately set the bar at a height the band would fail to ever hit again (hot take). On the flip, “Give Up” sinks into monochrome post-punk malaise as if NEW ORDER had never discovered the dancefloor, with wavering, saturnine keys and a tenuous edge of despair in vocalist Caesar’s delivery, all set into motion again by that darkly melodic bobbing bass. A single that’s been given a new life as a reissue once already this century and thus far from a lost-to-time obscurity, but that all-timer of an A-side makes a pretty strong case for yet another revisit.