Wire - "Read & Burn 03"

Wire - No Warning Given (Pinkflag 2007)

Wire – Read & Burn 03 / Pinkflag

Where would we be without Wire? It’s pretty hard to understate the influence they’ve had on contemporary underground music with today’s stylistic hybrid upon hybrid upon hybrid nature. Wire is the club where the punk kids, the noisemakers, the avant-poppers and… well England can all intermingle merrily, trade ideas and become better, more ambitious musicians as a result. It seems almost unfair that the London foursome is still recording new material, and quality new material at that. Not that we are not already iconically revering the band, but all the hoopla surrounding the Ian Curtis movie has me wondering exactly why we hold the tragic stories on such higher levels than the persevering ones. Curtis certainly does deserve your respect, but don’t spend all your time wallowing in the past or you are going to miss the opportunity to experience living legends while they are still, you know, living.

Wire is working on decade four of their unprecedented and unpredictable career. The post-punk pioneers have made a living out of patience and reinvention. “Out of ideas? No worries, we’ll just take a break. Go out, experience the world, flesh out some of those inklings you’ve got and we’ll meet back here in five years. Our audience will be waiting.” And wait we did. Here we are on the third reactivation of the band and believe it or not, the music is still pertinent, creative and urgent as ever. Who would of thought just not forcing creativity would be the key to a career of longevity and significance? “Common sense” you say? Well look around.

Enter entry number three into the Read & Burn series, a collection of EPs commenced in 2002. Eerily enough, this series is faintly mirroring their initial period of recording, 1977-79. Read & Burn 01/Pink Flag were urgent displays of taut, jagged punk. Read & Burn 02/Chairs Missing keeps the sparse brashness but begins to intertwine moments of melody and that hyphenated “art” tag begins to come into play. Read & Burn 03, notably released some five years after 02, enters into the same post-punk territory of 154: songs melt into experimental songscapes, texture and melody take precedent over intensity, and the lovable quirk of the band is in full swing.

The four-song EP opens with the ten-minute “23 Years Too Late”. Narrating atop atmospheric synthesizers and Graham Lewis’s taut bass line, the full-throated prose carefully tiptoes the line of goofy and cerebral. It’s the type of oddball abstraction that has defined Wire’s career, and with the more lulling moments tied together by the Colin Newman-led punk outbursts, you have got a quintessential Wire track… just stretched out to an unpredictable level (which further solidifies my point).

“Our Time” harks back to second phase Wire, 1987-91. Pitch-shifting synthesizers swirl amongst a post-punk bass line and slowly erupting guitars while Newman deadpans with eerie urgency. It certainly has that A Bell is a Cup aesthetic to it where Newman’s pop melodies are prominent and perpendicular to the wall of near-shoegazing guitars. “No Warning Given” stays tract with this sound, but with more of a punk backbeat to up the tempo. The guitar sound is particularly lush with each strum sent soaring over top the increasingly textured song. It’s that sound Wire is particularly good at achieving: simultaneously clinical and warm.

The final of the four tracks, “Desert Diving”, is more of the mechanical pop song found on Newman’s Githead releases. The music is not necessarily complex, but the instrumentation continuously weaves and wavers thanks to the immaculate studio processing. It’s a lulling tune lined with low-register, atmospheric guitar noise, which only further emphasizes the anthemic choral outburst before the track’s end.

Maybe the most exciting aspect of Read & Burn 03, besides of course the first new Wire material in five years, is that it actually may be a preview of what’s to come in the near future. According to the press release, though 03 is a stand alone EP, it is actually just four finished songs from a much larger set of recordings. In other words, a new full-length Wire album very well may be in the works. Yes, we are excited. Yes, you should be excited. And yes, we are expecting the unexpected.