Wire/Red Barked Tree

Ah Wire. I remember being utterly confused by their first album Pink Flag when I bought it in 1977. It had 21 very short songs on it, none of which really followed any song structure that I had, up to then, been familiar with. But for some reason, probably a combination of a lack of anything else to listen to, and not wanting to admit to wasting the £2.99 of hard scrounged money it cost me, I persevered. Until it made its own weird (wired) logic. And when it clicked, when my boundaries of what I could understand musically had been suitably stretched, I found I loved it to bits. The two albums that followed it, Chairs Missing and 154, were even weirder and even better. Incredible times, musically.

Red Barked Tree sees Wire back together as a trio, minus Bruce Gilbert. They have been busy over the years as Wire, Dome, solo and various other combinations of the original four members. I have picked up bits and pieces but still have plenty to hunt down in that particularly varied back catalogue.

This new album (well new as it was released in January last year), seemed like a must-have though, being the first proper Wire studio album for a few years. And it does not disappoint. I have no idea how the minds of creative types work when they have been making music on and off for 35 years or more. Do they still have the same urge to create new stuff or do they "time-travel" back in their heads to re-imagine themselves as 20-somethings to recreate that burning desire to communicate?

Listening to opening track Please Take, it certainly feels like it is the former. They sound like they really mean this stuff - "So please take your knife out of my back", "fuck off out of my face, you take up too much space".

And they still sound like Wire. That ethereal sound floating behind the guitars, bass and drums, just like it did on Outdoor Miner and French Film Blurred etc, is still there and plays its part in framing Colin Newman's vocals perfectly. Yes they are still working within the framework of what we know and love as being Wire, there is no great widening of boundaries here (they have previously used their other identities for that), but what there is as good as anything I have heard in the last couple of years by anyone.

Album of the week. By quite some distance.