WAKE UP

Search and Destroy Wake Up was an intermediate single of sorts. The band said it was a 'transition', a song that didn't really fit on either record that they put out to cover the radio silence while The Catalyst Fire was being conceived. But, honestly, like the band's insistence that The Catalyst Fire is a completely different direction, I find it hard to take anything DLC say about their own music seriously, especially considering that in hindsight, this single is the perfect foreshadowing of what was to come with The Catalyst Fire.

I remember listening to this for the first time, when I first got into DLC in early 2013, after my obsession with This Is the Warning began. I was listening and waiting, impatiently saying to myself "where's the hook, where's the hook, come on, I can feel the hook coming". DLC love hooks, and I love their hooks. It would be impossible for them to write a track without a hook, especially a radio single (although that would later be proved incorrect?), and this one didn't have one.

Chorus comes, and you can just feel Benzie searching for the hook. He's straining, signing at the top of his lungs, piling all his energy into it, and? the hook comes.

"Until I wanna make ameeeenndss"

And, it's a pretty cool one, honestly. Nothing compared to anything on This Is The Warning, but at least it's there. But this was a massive foreshadowing to the fact that Kim Benzie is loosing his hook-finding talents. The entire chorus of this song just has this whole feeling that he's trying to make it as catchy as possible, but just not quite hitting the mark. It's pretty decent, and an acceptable track, but you can feel that this just isn't as good as it could have been.

I obviously brushed that aside when I heard this, assuming that that was the reason they chose it as a non-album single, because it wasn't quite good enough. But in hindsight, this would probably be one of the better tracks on The Catalyst Fire if it were placed there.

7.0/10

Originally written for my Facebook page/blog: www.facebook.com/neoprogisbestprog