how would you rate their albums on the scale of 1-10? and also what are you general thoughts on them?

i know a lot of people like their 70s albums. but i'm kind of not sold out on the whole minimalistic approach to punk and whatnot. 21 songs in 36 minuntes, or whatever's the deal with "pink flag". what for?!

Lots of punk bands had short songs. Lots of short songs are great. Who gives a shit?

And Chairs Missing is the best, a solid 10. They were just a creative-as-shit guitar rock band, s'all.

Raging band. I don't even like dissecting or rating them. They'd probably piss on that idea too.

Short songs... an essential part of punk are these quick outburts of emotion or energy. Take an album like Pink Flag and the nanosecond between songs is part of the excitement.

I'll avoid Pitchfork decimals, and accept that Wire probably wouldn't approve such studied ratings, but why the hell not? I know what I like and why. And here it is (again):

Pink Flag – 9
This has never been my favorite Wire album because I heard parts of it in back when it was fairly contemporary (1980), and it sort of epitomized what I found difficult and unlistenable about punk: the breakneck pace, the primitive, jarring and brutal guitars and the exaggerated Cockney vocals. It was also the last Wire album I upgraded to CD, which made convenient listening a challenge. Since then, it's grown on me appreciably, and it's hard to imagine my world without "Pink Flag", "Champs", "Reuters", "Mannequin" or "12XU".

Chairs Missing – 10
One of my favorite albums of all time. It's the sound of a band growing by leaps and bounds and successfully walking a tightrope between art and pop, and noise and melody in the process. No bad songs, many incredible songs.

154 – 9
"Oh what a pearl, what a well-made world." A step beyond and also behind Chairs Missing. The evolution continues with a few missteps (I really don't like "Indirect Enquiries" or "The Other Window"), but with some giddy heights as well. "Chorus!"

Document and Eyewitness – n/a
I have not heard this 1980 live album, although part of me wants to.

Behind the Curtain – 7
This collection of outtakes and demos from the 1977-79 heyday is fascinating if you're fan, but ultimately one of those "get the original albums first" purchase for everybody else.

Turns and Strokes – 4
Mostly low-fi trivia. Almost worth it for "Second Length" and Wire versions of songs that would turn up fully-formed on Colin Newman solo albums.

On Returning (1977-79) – 6
The material is a 9.2, but the original CD issue was the only place you could hear essential non-LP singles like "A Question Of Degree" and the full-length version of "Outdoor Miner", which pissed me off. And what's the point? The first three albums and their singles are essential on their own.

Snakedrill EP – 8
Much has been said about "Drill" and with good reason, but for me it's always been about the stomping "Advantage In Height" and the spoken-word "Up to the Sun".

The Ideal Copy – 8
A really good synth pop album, albeit with an edge, of course, and containing a couple of my favorite Wire songs ("Ahead" and "Madman's Honey").

A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck – 9
I'll catch hell for rating this the same as Pink Flag and 154, but this has always emotionally resonated with me more than any Wire album, as it was a soundtrack to a long hot summer when many good things happened to me. Definitely Wire at their most pop and listenable, but still with an undercurrent of darkness that hits me still.

It's Beginning To And Back Again – 7
I don't mind the reprocessed live takes of The Ideal Copy and A Bell Is A Cup songs as much as some do, and the new studio songs, especially "In Vivo" are a weird and lovely mix and pop as only Wire can mix them.

Manscape – 5
I can't defend this beyond "You Hung Your Lights In the Trees/A Craftsman's Touch" and maybe "Torch It". Cold and distant.

The Drill – 3
I played this once. Once.

The 'A' List (1985-1990) – 8
As compilations go, this does a far better job of hitting the heights of the second Wire era then On Returning does for the first.

Wir – The First Letter – 6
I probably like this more than a lot of people. It's still a lesser item in the Gilbert-Lewis-Newman catalog, but with some really cool songs ("No Cows On the Ice", "So and Slow It Goes").

Read and Burn 01 – 8
Read and Burn 02 – 8
Send – 9
It's encouraging that men in their 40s and 50s can still tear your head off 25+ years from their so-called glory years. As hard and as relevant as they ever have been.

On the Box 1979 – 9
A Scottish Play – 8
These CD/DVD combinations of live performances from Wire's first and third eras are a pleasure to watch and a thrill to listen to, especially On the Box from a German Rockpalast performance where they play 154 material four months before it's released.

Yeah, I like Wire.

No shit?!

wire rules. i never woulda gotten into them had it not been for fischerspooner, lol @ me

Lol, indeed.

Dero pulled me in. Lord.

Some teacher at my school a few years ago made one of my friends a mix with a cover of "The 15th" on it. I was like, "Who is that cover of 'The 15th' by?" to the dude. He was like, "That's a Fischerspooner song," and I was like, "Actually, it's a cover," so he's like, "Who does the original," and I'm like, "Wire," and he's like, "Oh." One of the best songs ever.

On The Box is totally essential, by the way. Only one Pink Flag song, but it's still the product that really emphasized for me just how great the Chairs/154 material is. Maybe the best overall songwriters/craftsmen (although, I feel strange using either term to describe Wire) of post-punk. Plus, they open with my favorite Wire song, "Another The Letter." That synth line is fucking tops. And Gotobed's closed hi-hat 16th notes seal his place as one of the more underappreciated drummers ever. I'm talking about the studio version, though, so live, let's just say the song tears it up and is ferocious and fucking awesome. Word.

EDIT: I'm listening to "Former Airline" right now, this saxophone pwnz hard.

Man what kind of chester molester is making electroclash mixes for his third grade language arts class

One of my favorite bands, although I've never really gotten into Pink Flag. It's my 4th favorite Wire album. They would go in this order:

1. Chairs Missing
2. 154
3. A Bell is a Cup ...
4. Pink Flag

To be honest, I almost want to put 154 up top for sentimental reasons--it's the album I listen to the most, the album that got me into Wire. Yet Chairs Missing seems to be objectively the better album. And ABIACUIIS is Wire at its poppy best. It's so hard to rank these, though. They're all really good for different reasons.

Good song, listening to it right now.

Wire is a great band. One of my favorites, but I can't top Bobzilla's post, so I won't even try to assign ratings to their albums. I was turned onto wire about 7 or 8 years ago by a friend. He also turned me onto other great bands like Mission of Burma, Gang of Four, etc. I owe that kid big time!

gonna go out on a limb and say Chairs Missing is their best. Pink Flag grabs you pretty hard on the first listen but Chairs makes you want to keep coming back. 154 is good too, and the few post-154 tracks that I know are decent new-wave, but I wouldn't want to listen to a full album of them ("Kidney Bingos", "Eardrum Buzz").

It's posts like those that make Bobzilla a national SOMBIE treasure. Definitive and full of great information, if perhaps a little generous with some of the 8's and 9's

What can a humble lesser fan offer, save for that the later, mid-eighties syntho stuff is REAL good and so often overlooked by Chairs Missing and 154 purists? I love The Ideal Copy, and recommend the Enigma expanded version with the Snakedrill-EP, and It's Beginning to and Back Again has an amazing sonic envelope to it that really captures how they sounded live back then (I saw them three times on the Ideal Copy tour in 1987, with a weird tribute band opening that covered Pink Flag in its entirety).

Wire spin-off stuff is also very worthy. I especially like the He Said records (Pump still gets spun around here at least once or twice a year), and some of the Dome releases are really cool ambient grind, like Tim Hecker way before his time...

Edit: Elastico- The Ideal Copy is definitely worthy of repeated listens in its entirety. Trust us...

Hey, have you heard they're playing pitchforkfest?

only heard pink flag and maybe i had unreasonable expectations for it but i was not won over. it wasn't crap, but it wasn't revelatory or anything either.

i should probably go ahead and hear chairs missing, eh?

yes.

Love Chairs Missing and 154, but Pink Flag is the champ of the three.

Love how much they would change with each album. And Send from a few years ago was really very good.

Of course. It's just great, idiosyncratic pop music, and it sounds less dated than most things from that particular era. Sometimes it feels like a better produced, British version of early Pavement.

And I'm not a huge Pink Flag fan either. Some great songs ("Ex Lion Tamer," "Three Girl Rhumba," that's my shit right there), but I feel like there's a huge dip in quality after the first several tracks. Too much of the album just doesn't grab me. Fast punk rock wasn't their thing, sadly (in my opinion.) Chairs Missing is the one you want.

I think I prefer Chairs Missing over Pink Flag. I agree with PiR: after the first few tracks, it doesn'thold my attention quite so well. Send is just as good as either of those and probably even the best album of 2003, despite what Stylus would tell you.

Ha, Stylus. But Sam and Utz were outspoken supporters of that album! Guess it didn't go too well with the other non-2003 teenage SOMBie writers.

ah man, "Men 2nd", what a great riff.

"Mercy" is one of the greatest songs ever.

Fuck yes.

I love how it gets all increasingly loud and awesome and shit, fuck this Battles song I'm listening to, I'm going to listen to Wire instead.




That's better.

Wire was probably the best post-punk band. Have to agree with the folks that Pink Flag isn't anything to get worked up about compared to Chairs Missing which is probably the definitive post punk album. Forget that Unknown Pleasures shit. Chairs Missing slayed and made me realize that post punk didn't always have to be about the gloomy dirge.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Sausage OTM

and of course Send would be in my top 10 of this decade. Phenomenal band.

Wire tour dates

08-30 London, England - Hainaut Forest Country Park (Offset Festival)
09-08 London, England - The Scala
09-09 Leeds, England - Met University
09-10 Nottingham, England - Rescue Rooms
09-11 Glasgow, Scotland - The Arches
09-12 Manchester, England - Academy 3
09-19 Amsterdam, Netherlands - Melkweg
09-20 Ghent, Belgium - Minnemeers
09-21 Tilburg, Netherlands - ZXZW Festival
09-22 Brussels, Belgium - Botanique
10-05 Montreal, Quebec - Le National
10-06 Ottawa, Ontario - Barrymore's
10-07 Toronto, Ontario - Lee's Palace
10-08 Cambridge, MA - Middle East Downstairs
10-10 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's
10-11 Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
10-12 Atlanta, GA - Variety Playhouse
10-14 Los Angeles, CA - Echoplex
10-15 San Francisco, CA - The Fillmore
10-16 Vancouver, British Columbia - The Commodore Ballroom
10-17 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue
10-18 Chicago, IL - Metro

I know where I will be 10/15

Wire is touring the U.S. and no one cares?? What's wrong with you people??

Rock Band 2 is coming out and they're not on it.

I don't know very much about Wire, but their new album, Object 47 is good.

Yeah, it's one of my favorites of the year.

Wrote it off at first because I was sad about no Bruce Gilbert, but it's as good as the Read & Burn/Send material. Just not as shouty.

Excellent pop melodies.

"One of Us" sounds just like Primal Scream's "Autobahn 66"!

Colin Newman sez:



Bob is excited.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. I love that album and would totally like to own that two disc edition, but I also wouldn't mind a reissue of the original Send vinyl release with all the other Read & Burn tracks jammed into the tracklisting. Everything is shortened to fit the LP so it's supposedly like a modern Pink Flag. Always wanted to hear that.

Very interesting. I've always hated the CD mastering of Send.

I have that limited vinyl release (pf456Redux). The sound is good, but all the editing bugs me and I rarely bother with it. This new package would be perfect.

Yeah, I remember that, but don't own it. As if the Read & Burn/Send songs weren't fast enough, they just clipped most everything to be about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes long.

You can buy a download of the vinyl Send here, but what's the fun in that?

Yeah, I just realized after making my post that this 2CD release pretty much fills the void that not owning the vinyl created (i.e. having all the music from this era in one place.)

Send is my favorite Wire album. I just love listening to that sound. That and Object 47 get way more play than their three "classic" era albums in my household.

Ha! I just found the Metro Chicago 14th September 2002 disc that was thrown in with the mail order of Read & Burn 02 in a pile of CMJ Music Monthly discs. Holy shit, is this something fierce. The road ahead is quite uncertain.

Just got this last week, side one is a revelation.


Bhickman burned this for me, I've still got it somewhere.

I will never live down the fact that I missed this.

That show was fucking excellent.

Here's me right after it happened:



Great weekend at the Metro. I saw Deerhoof there the night before. Followed by Hercules & Love Affair a couple hours later. Just epic.

Surprised this thread isn't longer, seems like a very SOMB band. Anyway, I have an odd way of getting into great artists' work. I typically can't listen to their agreed upon classics and get into them. It takes someting new a current that touches me just right. After years of trying, it took Time out of Mind for me to get Dylan. Ragged Glory did it with Neil, The Rising with Bruce, and so on. Anyway, I haven't spent a ton of time on Wire. I tried Pink Flag somewhere along the line. It was good, but didn't get me obsessed and I think I sold it back years ago. Long story short, because it was cheap on emusic and I needed to use some of my credits, I bought the new Red Bark Trees on Tuesday and it has 100% kicked my ass. I can't stop listening. Now comes the time when I blow way too much money and buy every Wire record. So I ask you SOMB, they've got a couple poorly rated ones on All Music, I usually don't pay that much attention, but is there any Wire release I should straight up not waste my money on? Drill seems to be my biggest concern, but I don't know enough to say. And no, I usually don't go looking for my music free.

Everybody hates Manscape, it seems.

Object 47 and Send are absolutely essential. I like them more than the new one and maybe even their agreed upon classics, as well. If you dig RBT, those should be priorities.

almost everybody

I love it, but then again I first got into them during that period.

Going back to my ratings on the first page of this thread here, Of the proper albums, I'd avoid The Drill and get Manscape and The First Letter only after you've gotten everything else.

I like Red Barked Tree a lot. Much more than Object 47, which had its moments, but didn't engage me the way the best Wire albums do. Still not sold on the mid-tempo quieter things like "Adapt" and "Down To This", but that sequence of "Clay" "Bad Worn Thing" "Moreover" "A Flat Tent" and "Smash" in the middle is easily my favorite stretch of music of the dozen or so 2011 albums I've heard so far. And "Red Barked Trees" is as pretty and compelling as any song that they've done.

Nice call Mr. Ist Rad, got Object 47 and loving it. A great choice for me because it seems RBT is a fairly natural extension of it. At first listen One of Us, Circumspect, Four long Years and Are You Ready? are amazing. Can't say I like it more than RBT, though, because it's got Moreover and Please Take which is my favorite song I've heard in I don't know how long.

Anyway, the wife and kid are away for the next 24 hours so my night will be downloading Send and maybe A Bell is a Cup and either Missing Chairs or 154. I may even buy some fucking Tito's Handmade Vodka and really get this solo party started.

Thanks for the advice.

Thanks Bob, great insight on your ratings. Should have looked at the whole thread, but was just trying to stir up some discussion. I'm going to end up getting all these sooner rather than later probably, except The Drill.

http://product.half.ebay.com/_W0QQprZ3152989QQcpidZ1779027

Good quality sound and video from a recent live performance, heavy on Red Barked Tree material.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6CB90E70A4382882