Wire, Send
The already lean post-punk band strips to skin and bones
When Wire reconvened circa 2000 for their third incarnation as a band, they did a brief tour where they played old material — the first time, really, they'd ever looked back at their career. Perhaps playing the hyper-compressed rockers from their earliest days got them interested in very loud, very tense music again, but after issuing the first two Read & Burn EPs as "status reports," they compiled parts of both of them (and a few new tracks) for Send, the most muscular album they'd ever made. It's blisteringly loud, fast and smart, ditching the chiming pop surfaces of their '80s incarnation in favor of a harsh, nearly relentless grind and slam.
The abstract lyrics, brief running times (aside from the seven-minute earthquake of a finale, "99.9") and skin-and-bones riffs have more in common with 1977's Pink Flag than any of their other records, but this is the Pink Flag aesthetic run through a CPU grinder — electronic editing and digital distortion are a big part of Wire mark III's sound.
The songs on Send are sometimes not much more than gestures to wrap an arrangement around — the title of "Nice Streets Above" is also the entire extent of its lyrics, hissed in a furious robotic voice — but both of Wire's singers, guitarist Colin Newman and bassist Graham Lewis, get off some good ones. "Comet" is a three-chord, one-note marvel about "a heaven-sent extinction event," and "The Agfers of Kodack" finds Lewis bellowing a nearly incomprehensible but commanding hellfire sermon with Newman crooning a countermelody behind him and Bruce Gilbert adding ripostes of steel-wool guitar noise. And their compositions aren't even as set in this form as Pink Flag's immaculate miniatures were: just in case anyone found the two-to-three-minute tracks on Send excessively long-winded, the band also issued pf456 Redux, which slices the 16 songs that make up Send and Read & Burn 1 and 2 down to a total running time under 40 minutes.
