MVP features artists and their favorite albums.

This go-around, Martin Roork of Los Angeles’ Tomemitsu talks about his love for The Wake‘s Here Comes Everybody full-length.

I first heard The Wake at a party. A friend of a friend was going to try to DJ, and with her brother’s gear. It took a while to get everything set up but it was a cool October night and I settled into a couch across the room relaxing into my thoughts. The next thing I noticed was that the record she had put on (Here Comes Everybody) must have been warped. The keys were going in and out of tune. It was like they had some extra slow vibrato effect and I thought that was pretty crazy. Once the first lyrics hit me, “this is a page from my diary” and that beat kicked in, I was transfixed.

I think the next song she put on was “Sail Through.” I went up and asked her if the record was warped but it turned out she was missing a cable or something for the mixer so she just had used her computer instead. There’s something about those keyboards that I think is pretty fantastic and mind altering—and I like it when music causes you to question your sanity.

At the time, I hadn’t really delved much into music from the 80s. I guess it reminded me of New Order, and the emotion of the singing made me think of The Cure. It was like those bands but I liked how it wasn’t nearly as perfect. And not quite as dark as Joy Division.

It was so dreamy but it was also kind of raw and unpolished. All the different parts were so cool, the triggered drums mixed with live drums, the intricate but not too insane guitar. It just made me feel happy and sad at the same time—and I was thinking that even when “Melancholy Man” came on. And I realized at that very moment in time that I was having one of those precious moments where you hear music and everything else around you doesn’t matter.

Read our thoughts on Tomemitsu’s m_o_d_e_s LP here, and stream the entire album below: