Wire: The Ideal Copy : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

When head-banger scholars look back in nostalgia at Wire, they regard this class-of-'77 English punk band as the originator of the abrasive sixty-second song. But Wire was more than the progenitor of the Minutemen. The band merged punk anxiety with art-rock aspiration and Euro-disco precision to arrive at a tuneful, often danceable new noise. On its first studio LP of the Eighties, The Ideal Copy, Wire doesn't offer a perfect imitation of its cherished old sound. It simply moves, to borrow from one of the song titles, "Ahead."

What made Wire sonically wonderful, even in its earliest three-chord-thrash days, was the synthesis of six-string distortion and pristine production, with progressively more emphasis on the latter. The Ideal Copy tips the scales even further to the electronically processed side, which is bound to offend punk purists. But Wire was always anything but pure. Robert Gotobed's ultra-crisp drumming, for example, dabbled in disco from the beginning – now it's just louder. Guitars still dominate, but on this album they buzz, blast and hum like something else. Producer Gareth Jones, most noted for his work with Depeche Mode, takes the cool, detached approach developed by Mike Thorne for Seventies Wire and makes it attractively cold. The Ideal Copy is music begging for a CD player.

R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe acknowledges Wire as an inspiration; take one look at the printed lyrics and you'll know why. As with R.E.M., non sequiturs and abstractions abound, forcing listeners to invent meanings. As one critic has said, "Your R.E.M. is bound to be different than my R.E.M." The same can be said for Wire, and I'm sure glad mine is back.