WIRE レコード& CD

Review: Over the course of their stop-start career, WIRE has been responsible for some brilliant and awe-inspiring music, consistently delivering an atmospheric, sonically detailed sound that has variously touched on art-punk, post-punk, experimental and alternative rock. For many fans, though, it's the work that they created during the late 1970s that will always be the band's strongest musical statement. Not About To Die, the group's latest release, revisits this fertile period, offering up raw but surprisingly on-point studio demos recorded before and during the sessions for Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979). It's the sound of a band evolving and innovating, at a point when they were still to establish themselves as innovative underground heroes.

Review: This typically robust, stomping collection of growling post-punk gems charts Wire's first wave of productivity forming their reformation in 1999. It was initially released in 2003 as a compilation of tracks released in the preceding three years (including the two Read and Burn EPs and the Send album). This edition has been re-mastered, with the brutal edits of the original CD (a requirement thanks to the sheer length of the collated cuts) replaced with more subtle and less dramatic tweaks. It delivers pretty much everything you want from Wire - intensity, darkness, energy and heaviness - and is well worth your attention, especially as this particular CD edition has only been manufactured in limited quantities.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Sleeve damaged and slight surface marks on records, but otherwise in excellent condition***


Nine years is probably more than a hiatus really. By that point people are starting to wonder if you will ever try and make a come back. Wire did just that in 1999 after vanishing with plenty of impressive traces in 1990. In 2001, they set about putting out five records, Twelve Times You, Read and Burn 01, Read and Burn 02, Send, and finishing with PF456 Redux. The latter compared both Read and Burn EPs, alongside the full Send album, on vinyl. Sadly, technical limitations meant this had to be shortened versions of the tracks, hence the PF456 title, referring to both catalogue number and process.

It's not all bad news, though, because this means that almost two decades on we get PF456 Deluxe, which is basically the collection but without what the band described as "brutal edits". Longer, far more commanding and immersive as a result, it's still just as post punkish, punk-rooted, riff-y, original and utterly danceable.

Review: Nine years is probably more than a hiatus really. By that point people are starting to wonder if you will ever try and make a come back. Wire did just that in 1999 after vanishing with plenty of impressive traces in 1990. In 2001, they set about putting out five records, Twelve Times You, Read and Burn 01, Read and Burn 02, Send, and finishing with PF456 Redux. The latter compared both Read and Burn EPs, alongside the full Send album, on vinyl. Sadly, technical limitations meant this had to be shortened versions of the tracks, hence the PF456 title, referring to both catalogue number and process.

It's not all bad news, though, because this means that almost two decades on we get PF456 Deluxe, which is basically the collection but without what the band described as "brutal edits". Longer, far more commanding and immersive as a result, it's still just as post punkish, punk-rooted, riff-y, original and utterly danceable.