Send

by

Wire

Edit

Their best album in about 15 years, by my count. This album seems to mark a reenergized Wire, the kings of minimalist noise, who being older and wiser have gained a keen awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, and are ready and willing to make some more classic albums/CDs.

The sound harkens back to "Pink Flag" in that it is full of energy and full of insistent guitar buzz. This is a harsher sound, though. My first response to the album was "blimey, they should have more dynamics in the songs - maybe start with one distorted guitar for a minute before moving on to two". But, it hit me more correctly later. It's a mood. It's a cold, hard, angry mood.

Albums like "Manscape", while not entirely successful, hinted at what Wire can reflect - a harsh portrait of a world that has become a heartless system, where human emotion is something to be studied and manipulated rather than mythologized. Well, we're very much in that world. We're in a world dominated by a nation seemingly run by a shadow government, whose leaders tell demonstrably false lies to a population almost desperate to believe in myth. The aggression in this music, combined with the usual harsh bleak landscape, seems to me to perfectly mirror our times.

In short, it's effective art. Harsh, minimal art. If you've been a fan of Wire at any point, you should give this a spin or three.

While nominally a new album, Send is really a compillation of tracks from Wire's two recent EPs Read & Burn 1 & 2, assembled with four additional new songs. As such, it serves as an efficient introduction to Wire, phase III, but it's also but uneven.

The stongest tracks are culled from Read & Burn 1. On this release, Wire dramatically reconfigured the minimalist-punk blueprint they created with Pink Flag (1977), adding a huge dose of amphetamines in the form intense distortion, with just a hint of industrial influence. For a group in the third decade of their career (with most members well into their 50s), R & B 1 was remarkably vital relevant (though with all it's noisy intensity, it did take awhile for it to sink in with me).

On Read & Burn 2, Wire started to fall into a familiar pattern: After Pink Flag, Wire became progressively more difficult and deliberately arty, and made less accessible music (esp in the late 80s and early 90s). Read & Burn 2 follows a similar blueprint to it's prodecessor, but Wire employ greater use of studio effects, and the songs are more measured (much like Chairs Missing and 154). While this does does give R&B 2 more texture, it also saps much of the spontaneity, humor and accessibilty that made R&B 1 so much fun.

Unsurpringly, the best material on Send is from R&B 1. "In the Art of Stopping" and "Comet" are taut, catchy, songs driven by Gilbert's menacing guitar, Lewis & Gotobed's propulsive foundation, all put home with Newman's sardonic, funny vocals (it's refreshing that Wire have rediscovred a sense of humor). Unfortunately, only three songs here are from R&B 1, and the remaining material becomes a little tedious, and just kind of blends together (though "99.9" is ominously hypnotic, and the buzz-saw guitar on "Mr. Marx's Table" make it moderately compelling). It's also unfortunate that the best track from R&B 2, the melodic, almost poppy "Trash/Treasure", has been excluded from this collection.

For Wire fans curious about the band's recent output who don't want to shell out the extra money for both R&B 1 and 2, Send is an efficient, functional compillation. However, it does hint that Wire might be digressing into a familiar pattern of forsaking the entertaining aspects of their approach in favor of deliberate artiness, resulting in less emotionally accessible music.