Anatomy of a Hardcore Hit: "Wake The Dead" by Comeback Kid
Anatomy of a Hardcore Hit: "Wake The Dead" by Comeback Kid
Drumming Upstream 36
Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 443 songs to go!
This week I learned “Wake The Dead”, the closest thing to a hit by the long running Canadian hardcore punk band Comeback Kid. How did this song come to be Comeback Kid’s signature track, and what makes it qualify as a hit? Find out below!
Also, this entry has a lot of links in it, so be sure to read it on Substack rather than your email inbox for the full article!
Side A
“Wake The Dead”
By Comeback Kid
Wake The Dead
Released on February 22nd, 2005
Liked on December 9th, 2015
Every hit is contingent. Even the most sure-fire smashes need the perfect conditions to connect with the world at large. The right song by the right act at the right time with the right push behind it aimed at the right audience. If any one of those factors are off target, no luck. This rubric holds true at every scale, whether we’re talking about global phenoms, hometown heroes, or something in between. Just ask Andrew Neufeld, the current singer and guitarist for Comeback Kid, a band firmly in that bigger than local smaller than global grey area. When Kill The Music asked him to reflect on the legacy of the band’s 2005 sophomore album Wake The Dead ten years after its release Neufeld put it succinctly: “I think we owe a lot of our accomplishments to that album in general. Right place at the right time.”
Were I to list Comeback Kid’s accomplishments, I’d put “Wake The Dead”, the album’s title track, at the top with a bullet. The song is, if you’re of a certain age and subcultural milieu, an instantly recognizable anthem that changed the band’s career by itself. By Neufeld’s own math it closes out Comeback Kid concerts “99% of the time”. It isn’t an overstatement to say that the success of this song is a major factor in the band’s popularity to this day, nearly 20 years later. So how did “Wake The Dead” become a hit? What were the right factors that made it Comeback Kid’s calling card?
Comeback Kid formed in the early 2000s in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Growing up in the states my impression of Winnipeg begins with the Venetian Snares EP Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shit Hole and ends with the confirmation that “yeah, it fucking sucks” I received from a local I once asked about the city’s notorious crime rate. Roughly geographically parallel to Fargo, North Dakota on the southern side of the border, Winnipeg strikes me as a hard-scrabble working class town that’s seen much better days. In other words, the kind of place that would inspire a bunch of passionate young men to play their instruments hard and fast enough to take them anywhere else.
Andrew Neufeld and fellow guitarist Jeremy Hiebert, both members of Figure Four, wrote Comeback Kid’s debut album Turn It Around along with drummer Kyle Profeta in Profeta’s bedroom (more on Profeta on Side B), and released the record in 2003. Turn It Around combined the high speed melody of skate punk with the muscularity of hardcore, organized around the everyman yelp of singer Scott Wade and gang vocals written with massive pile-on’s at the front of the stage in mind. In a hardcore scene quickly being overtaken by Americanized Swedish metal, Comeback Kid felt refreshingly old school. They packed a punch, but weren’t meatheads. They could clearly play, but weren’t show offs. And, as the gang vocals made clear, everyone was invited to sing along.
The record eventually attracted the attention of the Chicago based independent label Victory Records. Some readers may have heard a peel of thunder and a pipe organ in the distance while reading that sentence, but for Comeback Kid this was a major opportunity. Though they’d built their business on tough-as-nails hardcore bands like Earth Crisis in the 1990s, in the early 00s Victory had bet big on bands that were filtering the sounds of 90s hardcore and emo into a professionalized radio rock shape. The bet paid off when Taking Back Sunday and Hawthorne Heights both broke through to MTV with “Cute Without The E” and “Ohio Is For Lovers”. These bands, derisively if accurately labelled “mall emo”, were god damn everywhere in the States as the early 2000s tipped into the mid 2000s, and they gave Victory enough of a windfall to go on a signing spree. Some of the bands Victory scooped up were essentially re-rolls of the dice, chances at the next big teen heartthrob rock act. Others, like Comeback Kid, were bands that hewed closer to Victory’s roots and had the good timing to emerge right as the label was flush with cash.
Right band, right time, right place, which meant the next step was the right song.
For the Wake The Dead sessions Comeback Kid worked with producers Bill Stevenson (Descendents, Black Flag) and Jason Livermore, major players in punk rock recording since the 1990s with a list of credits that would double the length of this newsletter. Experience behind the boards was exactly what Comeback Kid needed. Turn It Around is charming and well performed for a DIY punk record, but its undeniably an amateur work. Wake The Dead on the other hand sounds great to this day. Every instrument is clear, present, and bursting with energy. The band sound loud and hit hard but never overwhelm Scott Wade’s lyrics. Without changing anything about what Comeback Kid do or how they play, Stevenson & Livermore made them ready for prime time. Luckily Comeback Kid came ready for the bright lights with the best material they’ve written yet. Without sacrificing any of their speed, Comeback Kid doubled down on melody. Pushed-on by Profeta’s relentless drumming, Neufeld and Hiebert play double stop octaves like they’re racing past each other to the next bar line, crashing into floor-clearing breakdowns just when the tension is at its highest.
Even among this high caliber collection, “Wake the Dead” stands out. Inspired by “the kids I know who feel like they have no direction and are the living dead”, Scott Wade turned in a monster of a chorus. Comeback Kid must have known what they had here, because they start the song with an instrumental chorus to build anticipation, the kind of indulgence their rapid pace rarely afforded them. For the first time Wade’s call and response with the crowd edged into real melody, the kind you could sing without blowing your voice out if you wanted. In between choruses Wade shouts out two verses, one blisteringly fast the other dramatically slow, impassioned and vague enough to find disaffection of all stripes and shock it back to life. With an intensity usually reserved for voice actors on Shonen anime, Wade urges his living dead to “break the hold” and take charge of their lives. “Wake the Dead” is hardcore as a motivational speech, one that registers both on the class-transcendent “Born To Run” level and in the “Born to Run a 5k” sense. Where you’re going matters less than “not stopping” on the way there.
“Wake the Dead” was so invigorating that it won over even Comeback Kid’s critics. Along with an effusive review from Punk News (“the best singalong since Bane’s ‘Can We Start Again’”) “Wake the Dead” earned grudging praise from Drowned in Sound (“one of the best sing-along HC tunes these ears have heard in a very long time”) and Scene Point Blank1 (“easily the most interesting song they had done”). Scene Point Blank went on to say that the song “would fit perfectly in the next blockbuster zombie movie”. I can’t say for sure, but I have a hunch that they’re referring to the soundtracks for the Resident Evil movies, a horror action series staring Milla Jovovich based on a beloved video game franchise. Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the most recent entry at the time of the review’s publishing, featured a soundtrack curated and released by Roadrunner Records, which they stacked with artists from their roster like Killswitch Engage and Cradle of Filth, along with alt rock legends like Deftones and The Cure2.
Victory Records may not have had a platform like Resident Evil3 but they weren’t slouches when it came to promoting their artists. They may not pay their artists much, but they’ll do anything to make a sale. Look, I can’t speak for every corner of the 00s hardcore scene, but in high school I went to shows with guys from the suburbs that wore youth large t-shirts and girl’s jeans held up by studded white belts and guys from deep Brooklyn that wore oversized hoodies and gym shorts, along with guys from somewhere in between like me. I could have gone up to any of them in 2005, shouted “you said you said you said” and expect them to respond with “this time was gonna be differeeeeeeeent”. That doesn’t happen by accident. All of us were targets of the same Victory promoganda.
Here’s how they got me: my roommate at summer camp obliterated my understanding of music by showing The Silent Circus by Between the Buried and Me. It was the July before high school and up to then I’d lapped on the received wisdom of 90s alt rock and the waning days of nü-metal’s prime. I had no context for what Between the Buried and Me were doing, but I could tell that my roommate knew it was the good stuff, so I trusted him. I was hooked. Returning to school with a whole new world of underground metal at my finger tips and a determination not to be out done by my new friend’s expertise, I went searching for bands on my own. Eventually I followed Purevolume links until I heard the singles from Darkest Hour’s Undoing Ruin. Hooked, again. I ran out and bought Undoing Ruin. When Between The Buried and Me released their follow up Alaska I ran out and bought that too. Both albums were released on Victory, and both came with a DVD full of music videos from Victory artists. Both DVDs included the video for “Wake the Dead”.
In the video for “Wake the Dead” a figurative zombie in a cheap Frankenstein mask drifts listlessly through Winnipeg until he finds a flyer for the Wake The Dead release show. Rushing to the venue just as Comeback Kid are finishing the song, Frankenstein’s Scenester bursts through the doors and throws off the mask. Boil the video down to a sentence and it comes out to “find your purpose and your people in hardcore”. That might as well have been the tag line for the whole DVD. I was completely unprepared for the vibe shift toward mall emo as a high school freshmen, but those same mall emo bands subsidized their own opposition. The Victory DVD gave me the chance to define myself not just positively by what I identified with, but also the chance to reject alternatives that left me cold. I didn’t relate to the hair metal vampire antics of the west coast bands or the “nice” midwestern boys in Hollister and Abercrombie. But maybe I could grow my hair long like the guys in Darkest Hour, jump in the dog-pile at a Comeback Kid show, or focus on mastering my instrument like Between the Buried and Me4. In predictably teenage fashion I tried all three.
The reality behind the “Wake The Dead” video’s vision of hardcore unity and determination was far more fragile. After ten months of touring on Wake The Dead Scott Wade announced that he was quitting Comeback Kid. “Some would like to see this band go as far as it possibly can, and I was an anchor holding this back”, Wade explained on a MySpace bulletin (it was 2005, after all). The relentless touring required to turn a hit into a career had worn Wade down. Wade’s concerns about the band’s future likely dated all the way back to the Wake The Dead recording sessions, when the band were deliberating which label to sign with. Once they’d settled on Victory’s contract “Scott definitely signed it and threw the pen upset” according to Neufeld. In this light Wake The Dead isn’t the spark that starts the flame but the last embers of a fire dying out. Listening ten years later, it isn’t Wade’s passion that stands out but his melancholy and uncertainty. “Where did we lose control? We thought it’d last forever” he laments on the album’s opening track, and closes the record by announcing “this is my final goodbye”. Caught between these these poles of doubt and fatal resolution, “Wake the Dead” is the last gasp of hope at making Wade’s dream of “play[ing] something honest” real.
It’s no secret that hardcore punk is a young man’s game, one whose generations revolve faster than most genres. The same year that I Liked “Wake the Dead” on Spotify I made friends with a 19 year old coworker of mine by bonding over professional basketball and hardcore. He was a Pistons fan, god bless his soul. When he showed me Counterparts, a newer Canadian hardcore band with a melodic streak, I told him that they reminded me of Comeback Kid and Misery Signals5. Both bands were by that point too old to be on his radar. A few months later a friend of mine from high school, one that I went to plenty of shows with back in the day, invited me to see Comeback Kid at Reggie’s in Chicago. Even at age 25 I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was at a concert for the olds and that the two of us were already old ourselves. There were no dog piles at the front of the stage, only a few scattered moshers among a crowd of guys nursing beers and reminiscing. That is, until Comeback Kid played “Wake the Dead”. Even in a less than full house the song detonated the room, bringing me out of my reverie to scream back every word I could remember.
What is it that makes “Wake the Dead” hold up all these years later? Let’s take a closer look at the song’s structure and performance on Side B to find out.
Side B
“Wake The Dead”
Performed by Kyle Profeta
106-110 Bpm
Time Signature: 4/4
By the time I saw Comeback Kid live at Reggie’s, Kyle Profeta, the band’s original drummer and the one behind the kit on the studio version of “Wake the Dead” was no longer in the band. Profeta, who in addition to drumming also ran a vegan food truck called Bare Taco, left Comeback Kid in 2014 and moved Cape Town, South Africa to focus on his culinary career. Profeta still plays drums, in fact he regularly posts drum covers and practice clips on his Instagram, just like me! In the caption for one clip of him practicing his rudiments, Profeta wrote that for the first 15 years as a professional drummer he “busted his ass to get through songs”. If Profeta was struggling to get through “Wake the Dead” it certainly didn’t show on the recording. This song features some of the most detailed playing I’ve had to learn for Drumming Upstream.
One major part of “Wake the Dead”’s complexity is its tempo. The song gets steadily faster as it goes, but within each section it stays locked into the same BPM. Either the band mapped out the click track to change with each new part, or they rehearsed the song to death and played it live. In either case, the pulse of the song never changes dramatically, but Profeta divides that pulse three different ways by the end of the track. He plays it straightforwardly in the lengthy breakdown in the second verse, double time in the pre-chorus and chorus, and sprints up to a blistering quadruple time in the first verse.
The next level of complexity comes from how Profeta interacts with the guitars. In the Wake the Dead retrospective that I linked to a few times on Side A, Andrew Neufeld says that he and Jeremy Hiebert wrote the riffs to their songs first, then brought in Profeta for drums before involving Scott Wade. This makes a lot of sense, because Profeta’s playing moves in lockstep with what Neufeld and Hiebert are doing. Profeta changes his cymbals in time with the chord changes, synchronizes his fills with the accents of the rhythm guitars, and stops dead in his tracks when the Neufeld and Hiebert do. Nothing about Profeta’s playing feels incidental or accidental, even his fills feel like compositional choices instead of improvised interjections, more marching band than jazz quartet, basically. This approach insures that every single part of the song has something interesting happening. So while Wade’s lyrics and delivery are what made the song an instant hit with hardcore kids in 2005, the subtle accents and attention to detail are what makes the song a joy to listen to nearly 20 years later.
They also made the song a ton of work to learn and a blast to play.
For this cover I wore one of my many Converge (see DU#32) shirts, this one designed by John Baizley of Baroness6, because I wanted to be able to link to the other Drumming Upstream entry I’ve done about a hardcore band.
On top of catching nearly all of the details in Profeta’s drum part (astute listeners might have noticed that I still missed a few cymbal accents in the final take) what made “Wake the Dead” difficult to play is idiomatic to playing hardcore punk in general. Hardcore drumming isn’t just normal rock drumming played louder and faster. The genre has its own vocabulary that needs to be internalized before it can be played authentically. Some of these techniques, the emphasis on hand speed and the frequency of anticipated downbeats, overlap with skills I’ve picked up from playing in metal bands. Others, like the beat that Profeta plays during the first verse, took concentrated effort to wrap my head around.
When a metal drummer plays this kind quadruple time groove they typically play every subdivision of the beat with their lead hand. Essentially this means that the lead hand plays twice as often as the snare hand and acts as a glue between the kick drum and the snare. Not so here. Instead Profeta plays his hands at the same time, on the 16th note offbeats, and only plays the quarter note pulse with his kick drum. I’ve mentally referred to this type of beat as “pancaking” in my head, I think because of the way the hi-hats and snare are “stacked” on top of each other. If you’re used to feeling the pulse in your right hand, the way I am, pancaking can make you feel unsure of where the downbeat pulse even is. So much emphasis is put on the hands that they can start to feel like the downbeat instead of the kick drum hits, which makes the whole groove topple over. I had to slow this groove way down and learn how to lead with my foot so as to not lose the beat when I sped back up to the song’s tempo.
I’m glad that I did. Not only did it let me play this awesome song correctly, learning how to “pancake” properly helped me understand the way hardcore drummers feel time on a physical level, and improved my own sense of time in the process. I still felt like I was busting my ass to make it to the end of the tune, the same way Profeta described feeling for years, but I had internalized an essential part of the song’s spirit and came away with a better understanding of why I love “Wake the Dead” so much.
To find out exactly how much I love “Wake the Dead” scroll below to the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
I’ve joked in a few entries that I don’t like running to heavy music. Some people find it motivating, but the adrenaline rush that heavy music gives me is way too stressful when I’m trying to consciously control my pace and breathing. The only exception I’ll make is for “Wake the Dead”. Near the end of one run through Logan Square, as I was turning onto Diversey for the last leg to my apartment, “Wake the Dead” came up on shuffle. I was by this point a mess, breathing heavy, form ragged, just trying to power through to the finish line. Then the song reached the build up to its final chorus. Profeta digs into a long snare roll while Neufeld & Hiebert hammer away at a dominant chord. “I believe it’s in you” Wade yells with full conviction, “RISE!”. Have you ever felt full body goosebumps while covered in sweat? I must have hit my highest pace of the whole run for those last few blocks before collapsing on my stoop.
I got those same goosebumps the first time I heard the chorus to “Wake the Dead” as a teen, and I get those goosebumps now as an adult when Wade switches to a harmony in the final chorus. When I trawled the internet for fan commentary on the song I came across an interaction on Reddit that summed up everything I was looking for:
Well, guilty as charged. I am in my 30s and from the east coast and I am happy to over rate Comeback Kid’s “Wake the Dead” every chance I get. It’s one of my favorite hardcore punk songs ever, and that puts it in at number 8 on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard.
The Current Top 10
“Wake The Dead” by Comeback Kid
Thanks for reading. For the next entry I’m going to finally bite the bullet and talk about Kanye West. Luckily he won’t show up alone. Until then, I hope you have a nice week!
Full disclosure: Scene Point Blank have written positively about my band Lamniformes and have asked me write a few guest posts for them over the years. Not necessarily relevant to this conversation, but hey, due diligence.
Both The Cure and Deftones will appear in Drumming Upstream, though not for their contributions to the Resident Evil: Apocalypse soundtrack.
Though fwiw, they did get a few placements for their roster on the Underworld: Evolution soundtrack, roughly the Pepsi to Resident Evil’s Coke, including the only good Atreyu song.
Between the Buried and Me and Darkest Hour will both appear in Drumming Upstream.
Misery Signals will appear in Drumming Upstream. Counterparts won’t, but that band rocks.
Baroness will appear in Drumming Upstream.