Chuck Prophet speaks the old language of rock’n’roll as if it’s bright and new. His long gone band Green On Red were R.E.M.’s Eighties peers, and as rock’s cultural tide has receded, his loyalty to its spirit of liberty, askance at authority and place with those clinging to or embracing the bottom rung has become a natural act of faith.
Wake the Dead is Prophet’s first album since his recovery from cancer, and splices his Mission Express band with ¿Qiensave?, Californian practitioners of cumbia, the Columbian sound which proved his musical light in dark times. He’s sought fresh inflections and wellsprings before, venturing to Mexico City for ¡Let Freedom Ring! (2009), and the Latin rhythms here embody Wake the Dead’s title, as Prophet strides out of the shadows which almost engulfed him with characteristically louche mien and quizzically cocked eyebrow, and the voice which perfectly carries his wryly heartfelt words: a dry, breezy drawl which has seen it all but can’t wait for more. Sometimes he’s narrating a Californian noir, sometimes a funny ballad. “Sugar Into Water” is a song about songs’ alchemy, powerful pleasure in the moment and staying clear of “the politicians in the clubhouse” as Farfisa organ and rattlesnake percussion “play a while” in Texan style. Josh Baca’s accordion roars and dances as steel guitars weep, in a big, wide open mix insisting this is still pop music.
Romance is everywhere. On “Betty’s Song” shows loyalty to a lover in outlaw strife, like Dylan’s “Up To Me”: “If ever you’re in trouble, honey, I’m in trouble too.” “Sha-la-la/Sha-la-la-la,” he muses at the start of another lovers on the lam yarn, “Red Sky Night”, as if he’s already said it all. “If we don’t go now,” he adds anyway, “we never will.”
The exploration of Latin American sounds is another move in the loving, passionate miscegenation which birthed rock’n’roll, and given lyrical depth in “Sally Was a Cop”, with its “crooked politicos”, fascist parades and “children forced to dig the graves of their fathers”. The band hush in respect then ride into a churning storm of electric guitars and machine-gun drums, floating out purged on the other side.
Intimations of mortality are mostly discreet. “I went to see the doctor/…He said I think I’ve seen a ghost,” Prophet reports on “Give The Boy A Kiss”, which asks a lover for something to remember her by, countering fears of her leaving him “to wander for all eternity.” And in “Same Old Crime”, this dream: “I wish I was a lizard blowing on my trumpet, everyone I love sitting by my side.” Closer “It’s a Good Day to be Alive” moseys along on a country strum, telling its simple truth. “It’s a good day to walk on water/It’s a good day to swallow your pride/It’s a good day to call your mother/It’s a good day to be alive.” Everything now is “new again”, the near dead singer reborn.
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