Wire

Wire – Not About To Die (Studio Demos 1977-1978) (2022) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 17, 2022 · Comments off

The original Not About To Die was an illegal bootleg, released in the early 1980s, by the dubiously named Amnesia Records. The album comprised selections of demos recorded by Wire for Chairs Missing and 154. These demos had been recorded for EMI, with cassette copies circulated amongst record company employees. However, they were never intended for release.

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Wire – Silver / Lead (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 13, 2022 · Comments off

On Silver/Lead, Wire celebrate their 40th anniversary by throwing some intentional kinks into their well-oiled machinery. Much of their music in the 2010s was as fast-paced as their release schedule, but on their 15th album, they’re slower and stranger than they’ve been in years. Aside from the swift guitar pop of “In a Short Elevated Period,” this album doesn’t blaze like Change Becomes Us or Nocturnal Koreans; instead, it turns the energy of those albums inward on songs that shimmer like silver and have the heft of lead. Wire are just as keenly observant when they’re introspective as when they take aim at the outside world, and when Colin Newman sings “be a good witness of all that you’ve seen” on the minor-key T. Rex riffage of “Diamonds in Cups,” it’s an apt description of their modus operandi. Meanwhile, the grinding opener “Playing Harp for the Fishes,” which features bassist Graham Lewis on vocals, revives the darkly surreal ruminations that this incarnation of the band seemed to have left behind. The feeling that Silver/Lead’s songs should be faster creates a different kind of tension that’s arguably more provocative, and interesting, than a barrage of rapid-fire tempos. “An Alibi” is an uneasy post-punk lullaby, while the ironically named “Brio” evokes the languid spaciness of Pink Floyd as well as the desolation Wire mastered decades ago. Slowing things down also lets the melancholy that bubbled under on Wire come to the surface, and Silver/Lead delivers some of the band’s prettiest, and saddest, music in some time. Newman imbues “Sleep on the Wing” with a highly literate, ever so slightly ominous sorrow, while Lewis’ weary baritone is used perfectly on “This Time,” where he sings “this time is gonna be better” to a melody that sounds like a lie the moment it leaves his lips. And when he sings “Ooh darling/I want you to stay” on “Forever & a Day,” it shows just how much power naked emotion can have in the hands of a band as famously cerebral and aloof as this one. As precise as ever yet oddly moving, Silver/Lead reaffirms that Wire are more like mercury, shape-shifting effortlessly while remaining true to the things that have always made them great. ~ Heather Phares

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Wire – Mind Hive (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 13, 2022 · Comments off

Bang in the middle of the post-punk revival, Wire are here to remind the young rockers of today that they are still the giants of the genre, 43 years after their masterpiece Pink Flag. All comfortably over the sixty year old mark, Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Gotobed have produced a sharp, sombre, dreamlike album. As opposed to the post-punk terrorism of The Fall, Wire has always been much less monolithic, able to seamlessly turn from a feeling of complete oppression (Hung and Oklahoma) to sounding like the soundtrack to a yoga class, worthy of Pink Floyd (Shadows). With battered guitars and electronics, Mind Hive never treats its melodies with any kind of softness or gentitlity: all the better. – Marc Zisman

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