Wire

It's 1979: within the discography of the Wire, the shift is completed from the punk "blueprint" to a sound that is likewise disorienting and decadent, yet with unexpected openings toward pop avant-garde. Already in the wake of the release of "Pink Flag" in 1977, sharp-eared critics noted that from the punk movement itself the band retained only the nervous, petulant rhythms alongside the classic deluge of short songs (21). Everything else boldly distanced itself from the genre, and the overall sound revealed unusual digressions into unexplored territory. And so, the following year, the material became even more "hybrid" and hard to pin down with "Chairs Missing", a transitional record, laced with even bolder experimental touches while still resting on the ever-present monolithic framework typical of the era. The album left room for meditation, for the silent working-out, that is, of the fully revolutionary ideas "paraded" on the following "154". This is a work that "disfigures" punk-rock, dragging it to the edges of industrial psychedelia, a work in which the rumble of a polluting storm echoes through a decadent civilization; an immense, shattered work of art, the spectral mirror of a generation enslaved to perishable matter.

"154" is everything that would later become the soft goth-rock of the Cure's "Seventeen Seconds" or the noise-pop of Sonic Youth's "Dirty" and "Washing Machine". But it is also everything that came before in certain electronic experiments by Neu! and Kraftwerk, or in certain uniform sonic carpets by Velvet Underground and Television. The simple, hammering melodies of "The 15th", "Map. Ref. 41 Degrees North 93 Degrees West" and "On Returning" stand in contrast to the obsessive studies of "A Mutual Friend" or "Once Is Enough", tracks of secular mysticism and taut tension.

The overall approach to the compositions is intellectual, hushed, ironic and oppressive, yet it is completed by formal structures that are almost always linear and "comprehensible". "Two People In A Room" unfurls in a single stretch, laying down a snare drum to mark out the rhythm of a hardcore track, but faithfully echoes what came before: it is an emblematic point of balance between form and substance, it is punk-not-punk, which Colin Newman's voice drags into the great beyond. "Blessed State", in the same vein, sounds as if it stepped straight off side C of "Tommy", even as the vocal timbre veers into glam territory.

Wire thus take the decisive step toward achieving lyrical and instrumental perfection, peering into the darkness and intoxicating it with the gentle photons of a natural sort of "ease". It's hard to find such a run of flawless songs, in so many respects, that make the record paradoxically unique at times. It is, that is to say, a frenetic arrangement of elements repeated at set intervals, broken up by bursts of grimy spoken-word passages or obsessive guitar riffs and basslines.

Colin Newman rises to the rank of spokesman for the despair born of light, prophet of the founding tenets of a movement that would go on to count among its disciples the likes of Robert Smith, Thurston Moore and Steve Albini. The musicians' extraordinary versatility and the "clamor" of genres make "154" a kind of ledger of twenty years of music, placing it right at the midpoint of that span.

The CD reissues released between 1987 and 2005 are highly recommended, since they contain a handful of other small gems that seem to slot perfectly into the record's mosaic. "Song 1" is a freak piece, worthy of the erudite-madman Frank Zappa of the Synclavier years. But even more "spatial" is the following piano-and-flute stasis of "Get Down (Parts I + II)", an incredible panorama of atmospheres evoking waves crashing on a shore, surely a subtle, unspoken nod to the imaginative worlds of Pere Ubu and Throbbing Gristle. "Let's Panic Later" and "Small Electric Piece", aiming squarely at the stillness of the end, would play the part of a genuine, bitter closing scene perfectly.

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14/11/2006