If a keyboard cowboy steals your voice it might just serve your server right for trying to read and burn the last of the Mohicans. With one foul swoop Colin Newman proclaims punk rock meaningless and declares the joy of his latest bastard 'heavy metal dancefloor' bad vibing it up like there's no tomorrow. Those four negative horsemen Wire celebrate the art of stopping, which is where it's at - addictive repetitive mega-riffing retooled on hardrive and nailed down fast in paranoiac fits.Pink Flag
There is a lot of stopping but the big diginoise always starts up instantly, fleet of foot chasing rising temperatures. Three songs from this apocalyptic refraction of doomed cyber-slavery and secondhand information overload will have already battered your damaged drums long ago on the EP Read and Burn 01. Another trio burnt bright on the second 'close to creation cycle' six-song lowdown late last year, and the insanely catchy "Nice Streets Above," which is Send's only really upbeat tune, is lengthened a minute and seems to have gained more deep bass groove. This track was an early junkyard rifling in which Graham Lewis sampled and mangled a snatch of Colin Newman singing "Drill," but the mutation would be nigh on impossible to spot. Mutation is constantly hovering ghostlike behind many of the vicious scenes of Send. Cyclic evolution merges man and machine, catalogued obtusely in the closing pulsating monster "99.9" which might well be the most powerful track Wire have ever created, diving off sonar into unknown voids.
The longest track is heralded by the shortest, a rare vocal appearance for that funny ol'professor of noise Bruce Gilbert, whose voice is buried in incomprehensible swathes of distortion as "Half Eaten" bounces gamely by on a jagged big beat tip flashing vivid images of burning oil wells into the listening mindbrain. This ravaged track is a wartorn counterpoint to Lewis' internet reportage machine-metal ode to the liberation of oppressed ladies, "The Agfers of Kodack." They do not take kindly to religious extremism and build up inexorably to find it "Spent" with drills and emergency alarm bells blaring against quick fix. No that isn't Killing Joke, sir. Amongst the four totally new songs, "Mr Marx's Table" will be familar to anyone who crossed the line and came a long way for a short stay at a Wire gig last year, but they've sped it up and remuscled it with hardwired precision.
The weakest new one, and probably the weakest track on the album, is "Being Watched" which has slightly corny lyrics wherein some voyeur junkie protagonist wants Big Brother to spy on him in what is essentially a remake of "Take It" but sounds much more in tune with eighties Wire than any other featured track. Even if you'd like to give it up you'd never have the choice with a track of such ominous doom laden brilliance as "You Can't Leave Now" where a metaphorical restaurant is ransacked by Greedy as the Devil Dogs are set loose to deface him. The trap is sprung but there is a way out. All across the planet fires burn high as Wire fans blow up their computers in a ritual spew. Maybe guitars will be the instruments of the future after all? This album is so good it'd be worth annihilating 99.9 per cent of the human race to hear it, but luckily thanks to the arch kindness of the Newman you don't have to do that and if you buy it from posteverything.com they'll chuck in a bonus CD of Wire decimating Chicago last year. It's not hard to hear another unique event. Does that road ahead look quite uncertain? -
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