ALBUM: Wire ‘Wire’

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More than thirty five years on from their seminal debut album, Pink Flag, you’d think by now Wire might be content to put their feet up and wallow in a legacy that sees them revered as cult legends of Britain’s post-punk scene. A few re-issues here, a greatest hits album there, some nostalgia shows, the odd car insurance commercial – it would all boost the pension pot quite nicely without the danger late career records have of diminishing reputations. Wire have never been ones to play it safe though.

They were the band that warped punk’s raging nihilist spirit with conceptual art ideas and inspired a long list of snarling fringe acts, from Black Flag to The Pixies to Elastica and even today’s edgier oddballs like Parquet Courts, Savages and Fat White Family. To hear them still pushing boundaries and rumbling away in a dark and experimental world puts to shame the timid sonic ambitions of many bands half their age. Unsettling, paranoid and hypnotically monotone, they sound as challenging and iconoclastic as they ever have on their new self-titled album.

Opener ‘Blogging’ sets out their suspicious take on the current cultural landscape with mumbling Kraftwerk electronics, Devo’s sense of the absurd and a mix of bemusement and alienation with the 21st century. They do sound a bit like your Nan when she talks about “the Google machine” at times, but Colin Newman’s auto-tuned vocals add to the cold, robotic unease of it all: “Blogging like Jesus/ Tweet like the Pope/ Site traffic heavy/ I’m YouTubing hope”.

Their twisted futurism is given a touch of English, pastoral psychedelia on ‘Burning Bridges’, with a cascading guitar melody that chimes along like New Order doing ‘Dear Prudence’, and ‘In Manchester’ builds on that theme with an arch, wistful love letter to the city that could be Morrissey fronting the Pet Shop Boys. Things start to rage and rant a bit more on the surrealist, angular pop stomp ‘Joust & Jostle’ and the menacing, industrial grind ‘Split Your Ends’ but it’s on final track ‘Harpooned’ where they can be restrained no longer, breaking out into a grizzled eight minute purge of heavy, black clouded dirge and venom.

Stubborn and obtuse to the last, their fourteenth studio album might struggle to draw new followers into their universe, but there’s more than enough abstract post-punk curiosities to delight the loyal converts. Wire are still a razor-sharp, potent force.

‘Wire’ is out now via pinkflag.

Kevin Irwin

@TrotterFist

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

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