Either way, as with many of those early punk groups, line ups were pretty volatile and there didn’t seem to be any real end game in sticking around in one group for to long – stasis and all. You know. Either way, when Lora Logic and Poly Styrene called it quits with that aforementioned group, it wasn’t long before Essential Logic sprung up.
What’s weird is that there isn’t too great a difference between this latter group and the X Rays. Granted, funk and dub get ratcheted up a bit, but that seemed par for the course. It mirrors, to a certain extent the changes John Lydon would go through when moving from the Sex Pistols to Public Image Limited.
Regardless of their peers, Essential Logic, during its first run, at least, was only able to work up a seven inch and a full length, with one song overlapping and being issued on each release. As uneven as Wake Up and its four tracks are, the title track deserved to be included on both discs.
The versions differ by about twenty seconds. So, there’s no real necessity to track both versions down. What’s interesting, though, is that the introductory passage to the song comes off like a Pere Ubu cut as does the persistent and slinky guitar line that runs through the remainder of the song. It’s bizarre to attempt to pick the song apart, though. There’re at least four or five distinct sections each drawing from some disparate portion of weirdo music history. Better of worse, the song comes off as a proper distillation of Essential Logic’s musical bent. Logic’s sax is as knotty as ever with Poly Styrene’s vocals landing somewhere between new wave dance queen and graduate of punk high school.
There’re some other tracks on Beat Rhythm News worth taking a look at. But each can be reduced to “Wake Up” and its assembled parts. That’s not a criticism. It’s just a song that set forth all Essential Logic needed and wanted to be.