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Review: 'Wake, The'
'Perfume And Fripperies'   

-  Label: 'Blaylox Records/Bandcamp'
-  Genre: 'Industrial' -  Release Date: '30.10.20.'

Our Rating:
As with The Wake's ultimate heroes, The Sisters Of Mercy, they are just as prolific, this being the bands fourth album since forming in the mid 80's, this is The Wake's first new album in over 25 years. As soon as I saw the album cover looked like Body & Soul's art-work, I hoped it would have that sound too.

Well The Wake don't disappoint on that front, they sound like the bands I was seeing and hearing in the 80's at The Batcave and Full Tilt etc. Now rather than coming from the Goth heartlands of Leeds or Wakefield or Berlin or even Northampton, they instead hail from Ohio and while they claim to be a legendary second wave goth band I have asked some of my most goth friends about them and no one I know in England has heard of them before so they may only be legends in the USA.

From the opening notes of Daisy we know where we are in a great dark goth world someplace between the Sisters Of Mercy and Bauhaus at their slowest, this is deep dark cry to tell us Daisy's story.

Marry Me has the pleading and begging to Marry you tonight with the sort of ghostly premise that it may just be a marriage of Convenience for the night with illusions to what provides the fuel to the visions.

Hammer Hall has them complaining the music's too loud, well should I turn it down? Not good when reviewing to tell me to turn it down. Anyway, by now we should all be on the dancefloor doing the Ghost Dance the guitars are doing all sorts of classic goth moves you can almost feel them striking the poses too.

Break Me Not swirling guitars brooding bass and metronomic drums and a tale of goth despair of the sort that you would expect with no attempts to go Cyber, as if.

Perfume And Fripperies is darkly gloom filled rooms of romance and the dance among the ribbons and chains, the chase, the need to indulge, as the sound rises and falls between the Perfume And The Fripperies.

Rusted 20 stays firmly in the same vein only those chains have rusted over time as that guitar line weaves through it and we rotate those lightbulbs once more.

Everything features guest guitarist David 'Wolfie' Wolfenden from Red Lorry Yellow Lorry on the sort of goth floor filler you almost have to dance to, as the lyrics about what you want to say to your dead father slowly sink in.

Emily Closer (MH-Direct drive Mix) is the closest they come to going fully EBM or even having any sign of it while also having a bit of an Alice icy goth queen vibe too.

Big Empty isn't about clearing the dancefloor or even clearing all the hatred out of your life but is a dark maelstrom of sound and feeling looking at all the empty streets, the empty clubs, the life disappeared, it has feelings of pain and loss for a love gone away but feels like a very 2020 song of despair.

Figurine is slow dark ponderous goth beneath a towering guitar line slow careful drums and the pained vocals as she drifts away from you.

The album closes with Rusted (HZ Healer mix ft. Caroline Blind) that sort of slows Rusted down a touch and adds the female reply into the goth tale of love and despair loneliness and pleading for pleasure and redemption as you'd expect them too.

Find out more at https://thewakeus.bandcamp.com/album/perfumes-and-fripperies https://www.facebook.com/thewake/

  author: simonovitch

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