Wire need little selling. Thirty-five-plus years at the vanguard of post-punk and art-rock, their regular tours in the decade since their reformation have said as much about their audience as about themselves; the punk dads hold out for memories of 1977 but the band are about as interested in such retreads as they ever have been. The clipped, austere delivery and deliciously oblique, cryptic lyricism that have been their singular constants in decades of patient evolution are delivered with a poised and mercurial precision befitting their longevity, but the jarring volume and bracing physicality of reinvigorated youth. Object 47 and Red Barked Tree are as good as pretty much anything in their catalogue, and the careful repurposing of long-shelved first-wave material on this year’s Change Becomes Us is as fitting a metaphor for Wire’s outlook as you could want. Their choice of support is pretty fine here, too; London-based improv trio Xaviers, consisting of Yuki and Monchan of the mighty Bo Ningen on guitar and drums and Kenichi Iwasa on synth, seldom play live and never rehearse, yet pound out euphoric, transcendental psych-noise freakouts of magnificent intensity. There’s a few 10-minute excerpts on Youtube which I highly recommend checking. Apparently they’ll be recording each set on the Wire tour and posting them online the following day for one-day-only download. Excellent stuff.
WIRE + Xaviers
£14.50adv | All Ages*
Wednesday September 25 , 7:30pm
The Fleece, 12 St Thomas Street, Bristol. United kingdom.
Since their formation in London in 1976, the members of Wire have maintained and advanced a musical project which treats the creative potential of a rock band as a fluid, amorphous medium. As removed from self-conscious intellectualism as they are from the inherent conservatism of much rock music, Wire employ their unique, endlessly restless and risk-taking creativity to question every aspect of songwriting, recording and performance. They delight and disturb in equal measure, troubleshooting the circuitry of perfect pop, or patrolling the limits of focused experimentalism. In terms of working together as Wire, the group’s members disbanded in 1980, reformed in 1985, disbanded in 1992 and reformed for the second time in 2000. Such sabbaticals from their career as Wire have served to sharpen the group’s edge and focus, updating the tactics with which they pursue this shared project.
Wire came to prominence through the cultural revolution of punk in the UK, the effects of which were felt throughout the latter half of the 1970s. More than any other group from that period, Wire embraced the purpose of punk as a minting of otherness and newness—as a response to the notion of modernity itself reaching critical mass. From a seamless fusion of contradictions (fast and slow, funny and menacing, soft and loud, gentle and angry, clever and dumb) the group created a singularity of sound and attitude which was utterly distinctive.
Wire have continually made a creative virtue of the various periods during which they have not worked together as a band. Pursuing various solo projects and taking time apart has ensured that when Wire reconvene it is always with the impetus of renewed dynamics and artistic freshness.
The resignation of founder member Bruce Gilbert in 2004 allowed the group a similar pause for thought and reconfiguration. Object 47, the group’s first release as a three piece, found Wire at their most fluid and elliptical.
A period of live performances followed, featuring guest guitarists Margaret Fiedler-McGinnis and latterly Matthew Simms.
2013 has seen a reinvigorated, stronger Wire (now with Simms as a permanent band member) exploring material from its first phase and transcending the beginnings of those pieces. The resulting album, Change Becomes Us, is a mesmerising, intense journey, both Wire’s latest album and the ‘missing’ fourth, propelling the band towards new and unexplored territory.
Genre: Rock/Metal, Punk/Hardcore.
