Wire - Send

Wire’s first two albums – Pink Flag and Chairs Missing – will forever be cemented into the rock canon as records that accelerated punk rock past itself. Not only two of my all-time favorite albums, but also amongst punk’s most important. Wire, simply, are legends. Legends to rock ‘n’ roll’s lineage, legends to me and deservingly should be legends to you. And after 25 years, Wire still hate nostalgia. So with Send – the follow up album compiling last year’s two Read and Burn EPs and four new tracks – don’t expect these four proto-post-punks to reference any of their past musical personas. This is the band that hired an opening act to play their entire Pink Flag album so they wouldn’t be bothered with its so-called “dated” material, after all. Phrases like artistically aggressive and creatively ambitious don’t even begin to describe. Send, succinctly, shreds guitars that saw through stereos and drums that fracture bones and beats inside an industrial-punk blender. The disc’s eleven tracks are the most distorted 3-D shapes I’ve heard a record spew since Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR as Wire produces a menacing, ominous sound that buries their past post-punk aesthetic beneath shards of serrated feedback and distorted vocals. Unlike another of my favorite bands [Suicide], Wire have leapt across the generation gap between the burden of being seminal, original ’77 punks to present day elders where their noise is just as sharp, poignant and exhilarating. Send doesn’t tarnish the luster of Pink Flag or Chairs Missing as it simply – and effectively – places emphasis on darker, more anguished tones its predecessors barely hinted at. It remains to be seen if Send will cast the perpetually looming shadow that Wire’s two introductory albums have, but if history’s any indicator, Wire will be too busy breaking new ground to care. [www.pinkflag.com]