Album Reviews

The British minimalist art/punk band Wire’s first three spare, angular albums, originally issued in 1977, 8 and 9 weren’t big sellers then and unfortunately the chances are they won’t be this time either, though I sure hope they do well enough to encourage 4 Men With Beards and other labels to reissue adventurous and worthwhile, if not the most popular music.

If the current prices of used, clean original UK Harvest pressings are indicators, Pink Flag (Harvest SHSP 4076), the group’s first, and many consider their finest album, will be the best seller. Consisting of 21 short, slashing electric guitar driven outbursts, occasionally thick with murky atmosphere, Wire’s first was like punk Pink Floyd minus the psychedelics or in some ways, The Ramones meets The Velvet Underground.

The sarcastic and dismissive lead singer Colin Newman both screamed and simmered over a classic guitar/bass/drum backdrop that placed a high a premium on the spaces between as well as the notes themselves. Pink Flag is what happens when you strip the rhythm and blues from rock and roll.

4 Men With Beards chose to not send me Pink Flag, but I have an original UK Harvest so no problem. They did send the next two, and I chose to highlight the middle release Chairs Missing, (UK Harvest SHSP 4093). Here the production opens up to include keyboards and there’s a greater reliance on studio-generated atmospherics to create sonic mystery. The influence of Eno’s masterpiece Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) can be heard all over this record and to a lesser degree, the other two.

The abstract lyrics seem generated by cut and paste techniques using carefully chosen texts. For instance a few lines of the slinky “Outdoor Miner”: “Face worker, a serpentine miner, a roof falls, an underliner, of leaf structure the egg timer.” Got that?

Mike Thorne’s production is spare, inventive, spacious, enveloping and atmospheric, while Phil Hardiman’s engineering is crisp, transparent and three dimensional. You’re meant to surrender yourself trance-like so that when the final notes fade out on “Heartbeat,” side one’s finale, you have traveled and are mildly disoriented.

If you’ve never heard the original, you will find much to like about the sound of this reissue. It’s clean and well organized, and even some of the atmospherics escape from digital hell to the join the band, but it’s clear from both the sound and the credits, that a digital transfer was used to cut the lacquer.

I so want these three discs to sell well, I thought about avoiding the subject, but the back jacket credits say “Mastered by Denis Blackham at Sky Mastering/Vinyl mastering by George Horn and Fantasy Studios.” That tells me that Blackham (the famous and mysterious “Bilbo” who cut the original UK Track lacquer of Who’s Next produced digital files from the original analog tapes and Horn FTPed them over the Internet is what I’d bet.

Again, this disc sounds very good, since it started with a well recorded source but while the reissue offers clarity and impressive detail resolution, the top end sounds stunted and artificial compared to the silky, open top on the original. Transparency and three-dimensionality are diminished, palpable three dimensional images give way to cardboardy cutouts and the richly physical instrumental textures found on the original seem “under glass.” The usual but not as bad as some.

NOTE: I spoke with Denis Blackham, who mastered these reissues. It's worse than I thought, though it also proves that A/

D converters have gotten much better. According to Mr. Blackham, EMI didn't trust him or other outside mastering engineers with original tapes when these were mastered a few years ago (they've since changed their corporate minds), so Mr. Blackham was sent 24 bit DAT copies of the master tapes. He sent back "redbook" resolution data files on DVD, so basically, George Horn cut from CD quality files at best, or from a CD at worst.

Still, you’ll pay a lot for an original UK pressing and while US pressings can be had for less, their mediocre sound also makes them worth less. Without comparing to the original, the reissue’s sound is quite fine and doesn’t sound grossly “digital.”

By their third album, 154, Wire’s music had become even murkier and more atmospheric to the point where even old school Pink Floyd fans might find something to which they can relate. There was a major improvement in the already excellent recording quality, especially in terms of transparency, extension and dynamics. Songs like "Map Ref. 41 degrees N 93 degrees W" only improve over time. And someone get Scott Walker to cover "I Should Have Known Better"!

Of the three 4 Men With Beards' reissues 154 seems to have suffered the least from digitization.

Speaking personally, I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 from Boston. These three Wire albums helped me cope with the isolation and desolation of L.A., providing an important element in the soundtrack to my life back then. Almost 30 years later Wire remains utterly fresh, and in many ways still way ahead of its time.

This is timeless, vital music that deserves your attention and on vinyl, even if it’s been digitized along the way.