Wire
Almost since their inception Wire have been exceptionally fond of projects, processes, and predetermined restrictions–built-ins to prevent them from repeating themselves. Every so often, as a matter of course, the members pause and rethink their basic approach to playing together, and if they can’t find a satisfactory new solution, they quit. The three studio albums they made in the late 70s are dramatically different from one another, and though they would scoop up songs left over from one to carry forward to the next, they almost always recast them to fit the revised style. The second version of Wire, which began in 1985 with the same four members, made a point of never playing songs by the first, and often talked about wanting to move past the “beat combo” definition of a band. In part, that meant a shift from live percussion to programmed rhythms, and with little left to do, drummer Robert Gotobed quit in 1990. The other three continued under the name Wir, releasing a 1991 album and a 1993 radio session, then ground to a halt again.
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Weirdly enough, what Wire got from following the recipe is more like their first album, 1977’s Pink Flag, than anything they’ve recorded in the intervening 25 years. That doesn’t seem to have been their goal, but it’s where they ended up. Like Pink Flag’s, Read & Burn 01’s songs are so closely spaced and so similar in timbre that the disc comes off as a suite–“Comet” and “Germ Ship,” one after the other in the middle, both hammer at a C chord exactly the same way and sound at first like two parts of the same song. Grey bangs open the doors to every song, and his staccato hi-hat chop is exactly the technique he favored a quarter-century ago. (His drums sound live, even if the other instruments don’t–in the central riffs of “In the Art of Stopping” and “1st Fast,” for instance, the too-sharp edge of the guitar loop is audible.)
