on returning
Speaking of music with which I have an obsessive relationship, I find myself wondering what, exactly, happened to Wire between Pink Flag and 154. Wire's debut album is all tense, dry minimalism, bitten-off cynicism and single-serving songwriting. Their third album, released only two years later (and shortly before the initial attempt at the band imploded -- what came back is still one of my favorite bands, but a very different entity), is a cold maze of serpentine paths dead-ending into miasmic bogs. Very pretty miasmic bogs full of exotic plants and mallards, but there's definitely more chill than pop here. It's a masterful product of the studio.
Wire's one of those chameleonic bands that has been through so many phases that people have completely lost sight of how remarkable their constant reinvention has been. Pink Flag is recognizably a post-punk product, but next to 154, Magazine at their coldest sounds like a bunch of fuzzy bunnies, and at least Public Image's seminally dour Second Edition sounds human. I love 154 without reservation (there are very few albums I have listened to more over the course of my life), but it is a very forbidding monument. How did they develop into something so forbidding, austere and coherent so quickly?