Wire were born at the dawn of punk, but they became the quintessential art band. In the three closing years of the 1970s, the English quartet had one of the greatest opening runs of any band, shifting to post-punk before punk began to go stale and forging three masterpieces in a creative furnace so hot it burned out by the end of 1980. Those albums-- Pink Flag,Chairs Missing, and 154-- still sound remarkably fresh, and have been re-mastered and reissued with their original vinyl tracklistings, both individually and as part of a five-disc set, 1977>1979, that also includes live performances recorded in London (in 1977) and New York (1978).Pink Flag was a fractured snapshot of punk alternately collapsing in on itself and exploding into song-fragment shrapnel. The record's minimalist approach means the band spends only as much time as needed on each song-- five of them are over in less than a minute, while a further nine don't make it past two. It's clear you're not getting a typical 1977 punk record from the opening seconds of "Reuters", an echoing bass line that quickly comes under attack by ringing but dissonant guitar chords. The tempo is arrested, lurching along to the climactic finale when Colin Newman, as the narrating correspondent, shouts "Looting! Burning!" and then holds out the lone syllable of "rape" twice over descending chords, which grind to a halt over chanting voices. It's all the bombast, tension, and release of a side-long prog opus in just three minutes.
As if to underscore that this isn't a predictable album, the next song, "Field Day For the Sundays", rages to a close in just 28 seconds. The band acknowledges the thin line between advertising jingles and pop songs on the 49-second instrumental "The Commercial", but also write a few genuinely hummable songs, like "Three Girl Rhumba", whose guitar part is actually more of a tango, and the more identifiably punk "Ex-Lion Tamer". "Strange," meanwhile, makes the mistake of sticking around, only to be eaten by spacey amp noise and quivering ambience-- a taste of things to come.
Wire immediately left the crunch of Pink Flag behind on Chairs Missing, 1978's great leap into even artier weirdness and Brian Eno-inspired ambient experiments. Producer Mike Thorne's synthesizers took a more key role, propelling songs into haunting soundscapes and downpours of noise. The funny thing is that, though a fairly major departure for the band, the album cloaks its curveball up front, beginning as Pink Flag did: With bassist Graham Lewis's nakedly produced pulse being attacked by guitars. "Practise Makes Perfect" seems almost cheekily named for the way it builds directly on the constant crescendo structure of "Reuters", except this time Newman's ragged vocal is met with interjections of derisive laughter and the final comedown leads into a bed of gently viscous synth.
That denouement foreshadows one of the album's most arresting tracks, the starkly minimal bass-and-electronics sculpture "Heartbeat", an openly beautiful piece of experimentation that morphs into a pop song without a chorus. The album as a whole is less purposefully fragmented than its predecessor, the songs more conventionally structured even as they veer in unexpected directions. The stunning centerpiece is "Mercy", which provides the basic blueprint for an absolute ton of tension/release post-rock. Over nearly six minutes, it storms through thunderous verses with Robert Gotobed's drums shuddering away underneath. Each new section leads to a nastier climax, culminating in a blazing guitar-and-drum conflagration.
On 1979's 154, named for the number of shows Wire had played to that point, the band moved further into the abstract. "On Returning", "The 15th", and "Two People in a Room" are concise, punchy songs that place the vocals up front, sometimes with two-part harmonies. The last of these is one of Wire's great, frenzied moments, with Newman's tortured vocals shouting down Bruce Gilbert's intravenous guitar riffs with crazed shouts of "My God, they're so gifted!" 154's centerpiece, "A Touching Display", out-apocalypses "Mercy"; it's a hellish soundscape that features Lewis' heavily distorted and processed bass fretting out a harrowing anti-melody. Despite the incredible highs, though, 154 is also the least consistent of Wire's first three albums, and a few of its experiments don't bear full fruit.
One of Wire's overlooked strengths was their ability to write a tremendous pop song, as exemplified by songs like "Mannequin", "Outdoor Miner", and "Map Ref. 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" (an open field in Iowa, by the way). Listen to the harmonized "ooh ooh"s on "Mannequin", the softly sung verses of "Outdoor Miner" (which was only prevented from chart success by a payola scandal), and the transcendently huge chorus of "Map Ref." indicate this was a band that could have made an entire career out of harmony-laden power pop.
As it stands, they didn't, and Wire famously quit a year after 154, claiming to have run out of ideas. Their subsequent reunions have put the lie to that notion, but you have to admire Wire's insistence on laying off when the inspiration doesn't feel right, even as the band's initial run remains an unassailable testament to its unquenchable creativity. -- Joe Tangari, Pitchfork
For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.
I now find myself in the most bizarre of situations for writing—never before have I written something with absolute certainty that the artist I’m writing about will read it. And so it’s very odd. As I took notes on Chairs Missing I found myself wondering if my musical idol would read my review and… decide that everything I thought about the album was a load of shit. So why do I even bother now? What’s the point when my (albeit possibly pretty good) guesses on what the fuck this whole album is about could be absolutely wrong?
Chairs Missing then, is a cheeky pop album, perhaps the first so-called "punk album" to revel in and roll around in its own ironies, to own up to the fact that it is essentially an anthemic pop album, marvellously catchy, providing a safe haven in song structures that are so familiar that they sound like the band is fucking with them… because they have to change. That’s what Chairs Missing sounds like, an album where the band has already hit that turmoil (that won’t happen again until The Ideal Copy) where creative tension results in a jagged, disorienting flow, and where lots of songs that sound like they’re about freezing to death or something or other are delivered with cartoonish question-and-answer glee. Disco sits next to a punk song that desperately, desperately tries to subvert its own stupid structure by… never ending… and all of it is predicated by a gloomy mood piece where drums turn into a wash over trickling guitars and descending bass and a chorus catchier than anything you've ever heard.
At one point Colin Newman told Pink Flag producer Mike Thorne that he wanted him to play more keyboards on Chairs Missing. When Thorne declined, Newman said "we’ll just get that Brian Eno guy" - this is the sound of a band who realise that Pink Flag was only a Ramones rip-off and that, shark-like, they have to move to stay alive. As a result, some songs on this album almost hit six minutes and others hit only one minute; guitars chip away at each other and electric pianos run arpeggios underneath to foreshadow shoegazing. The first track samples laughing crowds and the last track ends in guitar overdrive. Punk tracks get bass pushed up front and guitars become less audible than snare raps and there’s a disco bonus track whose "beat" consists of saxophones and car horn samples; and of course, the prettiest song I’ve ever heard is about an insect who destroys crop fields.
Coming out the other end with Mike Thorne in tow, Chairs Missing, to all intents and purposes, is the post-punk album, in the truest sense of the word. Every song contains the familiar, bare-bones punk structure, completely devoid of any sort of bridge. But somewhere along the line, production stepped up, leaving a wash of synthesizers all over the place (synthesizers! in a punk band! in 1978!), sucking up Graham Lewis’ watery bass, and tracking under nearly every guitar part for a wonderfully lush sound. "Heartbeat," "Used To," and "Men 2nd" all tone Colin Newman’s vocal down to a whisper, maybe a coo, fuck-all, this is the sound of change! Of a new urgency! and take out screeching "106 Beats That" guitar.
Maybe this doesn’t sound so cool, but there’s a cosmic moment of transition that probably couldn’t be have been achieved earlier, between "12XU" and "I Am The Fly," where suddenly, it’s not about I got you in a corner motherfucker! can’t get out bitch! anymore, and it becomes I can spread more disease than the flea which nibbles away at your window display. There’s a sing-a-long chorus again, that’s for damn sure, but it’s not a rally to fuck the man, more to… annoy him? Where once laid roaring guitar there are now handclaps and multiple Bruce Gilbert and Newman guitars that sort of ebb into each other, like an accidental march. That… that this band, this incredibly vital four-piece who once made punk music are now making goofy, cheeky pop songs!
Chairs Missing is bitingly sarcastic, which I guess was the cool thing to do in 1978, but never did these bands make fun of themselves! "From the Nursery," I bet, is about being strangled to death, or something horribly grim, dropping words like "molester," "amphibious," "violence," "Christmas," and more shit like that—but by the end of this sludge, this absolute thump, thump, move, Newman is hooting and hollering with Lewis repeating every other word like it’s a power-pop number, and I feel like dancing! "Mercy", featuring lyrics that allude to a "Reuters"-like chaos in a major city, marches along once again, but Lewis’ loopy bass pops up in what should be the climax, like a needle in the camel’s eye, blowing out all that wonderful tension. So fuck it! The song pointlessly goes on for another two minutes.
We have a pop album then, pop being the lightest and darkest form of fun in the world. Where in "French Film Blurred" and "Outdoor Miner," Thorne collides 1977 with 1988. He adds vocal back-up loops, spinning guitars into a web of synths, and Newman plopping, into fairly sombre songs, wonderfully beautiful choruses to lift you up… and throw you into the mud again in the verse. God, "Outdoor Miner"added a piano solo on the single edit - EMI asked them to add another minute-and-half! To a radio pop song! Try taking this seriously.
And Newman and Co. probably think that last sentence is absolute rubbish—thatChairs Missing is deadly serious. But I somehow doubt it. In the interview, he mentioned the possibility that when people listen to Wire, they ask themselves "that’s great - but what the fuck does it mean?" A possible answer is nothing. So when technology is used to rip a punk band away from their safe haven of one-minute thrashes in order to, still using punk as a core, create a wonderfully cheeky and sarcastic pop masterpiece, to almost unwillingly change - who knows what this means. But when the very next year, another English punk group released a double album that erased the word "punk" from their vocabulary and grabbed from every influence they had, too; and another English punk group released a socially charged dance album; and yet another English punk group whose first single was about orgasms put what they called "atmospheric synthesizers" on every track on their album - it’s hard not to see some sort of influence.
How Chairs Missing still sounds new while A Bell Is A Cup sounds like it was made… in 1985… is one of life's great mysteries. I can hear Justine Frischmann pick out the synths taking place of guitars on "Used To" and writing The Menace, though. I can hear Kevin Shields trying to make seventeen overdubbed guitars and a ream of harmonised feedback sound like one guitar and a synthesizer. And I can certainly hear the very moment in "Marooned" where 154 picks up, saying goodbye to the second half of the word "post-punk" forever.
For once, Wire made music that was about the details that took many, many listens to decipher, to hear every part of a wonderful sonic collage—but still sounded frustrated and catchy as ever. And that’s why in 2003, Chairs Missing is the greatest thing to ever crawl from the wreckage of "punk rock," and when I say wreckage, I mean it, and from the wreckage, it’s cobbled together to make a glorious mess. Fuck Magazine, fuck PiL, fuck Cabaret Voltaire. This is post-punk. -- Sam Bloch, Stylus
Chairs Missing revealed a dramatic leap in Wire’s abilities, and introduced synths, with producer Mike Thorne beginning to take an Eno-type role in the band’s progression. Their pop sensibility is briefly shown off on “Outdoor Miner,” but largely the songs are less accessible in achieving their unique visions. While most are riveting (the long, piledriving “Practice Makes Perfect,” the exquisitely understanded “Heartbeat,” the rocking “Sand In My Joints” and frenetic closer, “Too Late”), some of the cuts drag or even get annoying (“Mercy,” “I Am The Fly”). It’s a fascinating transition album from the band’s original incarnation of minimalist punks to proggy art rock. It’s a testament to the band’s art that each of their three albums have supporters as fan favorites. -- Fastnbulbous