Wire: 154 [Restless Bonus Tracks] : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Over the past two years, Wire has established itself as one of the most artistically compelling English New Wave bands. Not that you'd know it here in America, where their first album, the minimalist classic, Pink Flag, sank without a trace, and their second, the more texturally ambitious Chairs Missing, wasn't released at all. Now Wire has found a new American label, and just in time, since the current LP, 154, is their finest achievement.

Unlike Pink Flag, which was characterized by a raw, distorted guitar sound so thick and nasty it made the Ramones seem like a string quartet, 154 is dominated by expertly layered synthesizers and a near-autistic vocal style that alternately recalls early Roxy Music (particularly in "The 15th," which suggests what Roxy's third record might have sounded like had Eno stuck around) and the original, Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd (note the detached, postpsychedelic sensibility of "A Mutual Friend"). Despite tasteful touches of flute, electric viola and cor anglais, there's still plenty of bone-conduction guitar ("Single K.O.," "A Touching Display" and the otherworldly "I Should Have Known Better") and, most importantly, more real rock & roll invention than most groups are able to come up with in a career.

Wire's thematic concerns have always been oblique, to say the least. Like the painter René Magritte, this band distills a witty, often mordant surrealism from the most achingly commonplace situations. Even the unremarkable tableau of two people simply sitting in a room (a train station? a doctor's office?) becomes an excruciating encounter: "The lighting is fierce/It's intended to pierce/Any cloak of deceit/And encourage retreat." In the hypnotic "I Should Have Known Better"–about as close as Wire gets to a love song, though John Denver would surely not recognize it as such–the singer observes: "In an act of contrition, I lay down by your side..../Am I laughing or crying?/I suggest I'm not lying." The fractured perceptions and deadpan jokes here are endlessly intriguing, once you tear yourself away from the marvelously convoluted hooks and richly realized performances that distinguish virtually every cut on this excellent album.