They were great. Giant Steps is one of the few timeless pop masterpieces from the 1990s. C'mon Kids and Kingsize are very good albums as well. However, Wake Up! seems like a giant misstep in retrospect, one that sealed their fate for good.
My favourite is actually "C'mon Kids", which I listened to constantly for weeks when it came out, though if I listen to it now a few of the tracks have grown tiresome for me.
"Kingsize" on the other hand seemed a lesser album to me. They were on the back foot and in creation's bad books after the commercial failure of "C'mon Kids" and I don't think they knew what people wanted from them any more. So they kind of waded in another long ambitious album but trying not to make it too weird this time and trying to shoehorn these would-be-catchy choruses into songs like "Eurostar". I like about six or seven of the songs on it.
The problem with "Wake Up!" is it was misrepresented by its singles as a cheery, cheesy pop album. Whereas taken as a whole it's a great, arty, concentrated dose of creativity. I don't know what I'd have advised them to do differently though. if you put pop songs on albums, they seem to have a habit of becoming singles. They lost a lot of their existing fans and sold a lot of records to people who didn't really get what the band were about, and who soon deserted them. Youm ight say "Wake Up Boo!" was their "Kokomo".
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