Wire
Coatings (World Domination)
by Nik Rainey
Conventional wisdom has it that it was a long trip downhill for Wire as a creative force after their debut, the pointillist-punk masterpiece Pink Flag (1977). A listen to all of their releases in order points up the problem: after deconstructing guitar-rock, they gradually divested themselves of its trappings, an organic acceleration into explorations of technology and sound as stunning in its way as the Velvets or even the Beatles. Like those bands, every Wire album has a character distinctly its own, each one sufficient to inspire a school if the intellectual patina they developed ’round about Chairs Missing (1978) hadn’t removed them from the gut-level yankery the inverted elitists in the prole-populist rock contingent demand of their heroes. Wire never played down to the crowd – you met them on their terms or they left you in the lurch. Which is why the ’80s edition of Wire, following a six-year separation in which each member tinkered with their individual machinery, angered so-called “purists” and appealed more to people with no recollection of their origins, the kind of people who thought Michael Stipe wrote “Strange.” Fair enough, because the band that recorded Snakedrill (1986) through Manscape (1990), while comprised of the same four individuals, was for all intents and purposes a new band. (So much so that they refused to play their ’70s material in concert, a move that led directly to the odd sight of otherwise meek members of the rock pseudointelligencia screaming “Reuters!” with a red-faced ferocity usually reserved for bottle-wielding football hooligans.) The stripped-down guitars with which they made their name receded into the background while synths, sequencers, and repetitive, chugging rhythms came to the forefront in brazen denial of the more-is-less ethos, and their pop sensibility, there from the start in songs like “Outdoor Miner” and “Map Ref. 41° N 93° W,” dovetailed with their experimental side for a much smoother, if subtly barbed, style.
If you’re learning all of this for the first time, Coatings is probably not the Wire album for you. In fact, the audience for this collection of unreleased mixes, B-sides, and air checks comes pre-shrunken: the fair-weather fans who enjoyed the surface-scraping “best of” The A List likely have no need for a compendium of different takes on much of the same material, completists will have much of this stuff already, and many ’70s Wire-heads have no use for this period, period. Which leaves the true, semi-frugal but hooked Wire obsessives, who will find much to delight in here, from the thorny shuffle of “Ambulance Chasers” (a previously-unavailable studio rendition from the Snakedrill sessions), through decidedly different takes on numbers from The Ideal Copy and A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, three tracks from a 1988 Peel Session (a particularly fine “German Shepherds” and one of the dozens of versions of “Drill”), and three rare tracks from the final days of Wire (drummer Robert Gotobed split after Manscape, necessitating the removal of the “e” from their name thereafter) which are actually better than much of the officially-released material from the period. The chronological setup makes this as educational an album as other footnotable Wire releases (such as Behind the Curtain or Turns & Strokes), encapsulating their rapid progression from post-punk to circumambient pop, the gradual phasing out of guitars and drums, and the growing vocal dominance of the deep-voiced Graham Lewis over Colin Newman (a take on “Ambitious” with Newman’s vocal instead of Lewis’ demonstrates how important the distinction had become to their new sound) in a mere 70 minutes. This band was slammed unmercifully at the time for favoring mechanical aesthetics over rock ‘n’ roll noise and seemingly copping others’ moves rather than mapping out new ones – Coatings is a handy reminder of just how forward-looking they really were, erecting signposts to the next phase of electro-organic sound.
A second disc, featuring Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert’s 18-minute “Ambitious” remix for Stephen Petronio’s “MiddleSex Gorge” ballet, is available only from Wire Mail Order, the definitive source for any and all Wire-related materials – check out their website at http://wiremailorder.com or write to PO Box 322, Alta Loma, CA 91701 for more information.
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