The 1980 debut full-length release from Julian Cope's Liverpool-based band The Teardrop Explodes, Kilimanjaro, is as bright, propulsive and passionate a pop album as any of the post-punk era. The band's second LP, Wilder, is a moodier, less-focused affair altogether, and all the more appealing for it.
In the 31 years since Wilder's release, Cope has seen the Teardrops disintegrate in an ugly mess of infighting and drug-fuelled chaos, has been reincarnated as an eccentric solo artist exploring music in its more esoteric forms as a performer, archivist and fan, and has steadily gained respect and admiration as a best-selling author with a special interest in Neolithic culture.
The album might not rate among his greatest achievements, but as the embodiment of his stated quest in pop music to "strike a balance between triteness and greatness" it's an artefact worth preserving.
The passage of time has also helped erase the worst memories of that era's fashion.
The Teardrops were guilty of tucking their balloon-legged pants into pointy boots and hitching their guitar straps several notches too high, but that's where the ugly comparisons to the band's peers end.
The songs on Wilder are exotic, romantic and peppered with hundreds of those tiny moments we come to relish for their offbeat beauty. In the choirboy clarity of Cope's delivery and the punchy mix of funk-rock, dream-pop and New Wave that his band creates around him, there is much to savour.
Cryptic confessional Bent Out Of Shape gives way to a beefy horn section that fills the sails of Colours Fly Away and sends it soaring. The shimmering production on the icily funky The Culture Bunker is matched in the pristine pop of lead single Passionate Friend. Through the muted synths of Tiny Children and The Great Dominions, Cope voices his internal struggle and foreshadows his impending estrangement from a band that could no longer contain the outsized personalities within it.
