Wire
Wire emerged out of the British punk explosion but, from the outset, maintained a distance from that scene and resisted easy categorization. While punk rapidly became a caricature of itself, Wire's musical identity -- focused on experimentation and process -- was constantly metamorphosing. Their first three albums alone attest to a startling evolution as the band repeatedly reinvented itself between 1977 and 1979. That capacity for self-reinvention, coupled with a willingness to stop recording indefinitely when ideas weren't forthcoming, has been crucial to Wire's ...[more]
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A complete, digitally cloned and audio remastered release of UK art punk giants WIRE's legendary one-hour studio concert on Germany's RockPalast television show. Performed and broadcast live on Feburary 14th, 1979, the band delivers twenty songs from their Chairs Missing and 154 era. Includes a never-screened interview from the same period. CD includes the audio version of the performance. Although 15th generation VHS copies of the screened parts of this performance have been making the rounds for m [ read more ]
CD+DVD $20.99
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REISSUE. Usually contextualised against a backdrop of 2 years of the growing cultural importance of punk rock-- Wire's debut Pink Flag, released in December 1977 on EMI's progressive label "Harvest" was in fact was something "other". To the keen cultural commentator the timing and label of its release will register two essential facts about it. Firstly, too late (a year after the Pistol's debut release) to be part of UK punk's first flush and secondly that the band were signalling something beyond pu [ read more ]
CD $14.99
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The number of groups surviving punk's first blast still able to ply their trade with heads aloft and consciences clear can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with three digits to spare. Wire is one of them. "Send" is their first full length album of new music in over a decade, and contains eleven examples of their most caustic and brutally compelling output in twice that time. "Send" contains four completely unheard new pieces, four taken from the mail-order-only "Read & Burn 02," and three from "Read & [ read more ]
CD $14.99
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REISSUE. 1978's Chairs Missing represented perhaps the biggest conceptual leap made during this period of Wire and was widely misunderstood at the time yet it remains, to the band and production crew Wire's favourite 70's album. If Pink Flag proposed an almost cut and paste approach to deconstructing rock history Chairs Missing proposed something more radical, a definite futurism with much less influence from its antecedents. Chairs Missing was at once more stark and more lush th [ read more ]
CD $14.99
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VINYL FORMAT. 180 GRAM VINYL! REISSUE. Originally released on Harvest in 1977, Pink Flag is perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk. Exhibiting severe art school damage, Wire careens at breakneck speed through 21 songs in 36 minutes to create an album that has influenced bands for nearly thirty years. Original artwork. 180 gram audiophile vinyl.
LP $18.99
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Restock. The hugely influential WIRE, having regrouped for a live performance in 1999 and wailed through numerous subsequent sell-out shows, ably demonstrate that their fire still burns. Read & Burn Ψ1 is the first phase of a series of new works and stage appearances planned for this year and on into 2003, marking a fierce return to recording for the band, and the setting of a standard that many of today's new chasers of art-rock's golden fleece will be hard pressed to emulate. There is only so much time in [ read more ]
CD $13.99
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In the five years since the May 2003 release of their last full-length album, Send, Wire has expounded, reviewed, contracted, lain dormant, recovered, expanded, and shed an old skin and grown a new one. Wire is not the same as it was before-- but then Wire is never the same as it was before. Object 47 (the 47th object in their discography) is nonetheless only Wire's eleventh studio album. It is the second product of an arc of work that began in 2006 and has so far yielded the rather well-recei [ read more ]
CD $14.99
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VINYL FORMAT. 180 GRAM VINYL! REISSUE. If Chairs Missing is the transition album from punk to post-punk, 154 is definitely of the latter genre. Synth moves to the forefront on this 1979 third album from Wire along with melodies that help humanize the electronic textures. Named for the number of gigs the band had played to that point, 154 shows how far this band had come in three years over three albums. Original artwork. First time on 180 gram audiophile vinyl.
LP $18.99
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1985-1990: The A List is a fine 16-track compilation of the highlights from Wire's surprising and successful comeback. This material isn't quite as essential as their early output -- Wire doesn't sound as revolutionary on these sides, although the music is still high-quality. It bears some similarities to the sort of '80s college-radio synth/guitar pop being produced by the likes of New Order and the Cure, although it isn't as danceable, and it retains Wire's signature love of dissonance and pure son [ read more ]
CD $12.99
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REISSUE. 1979's 154 represented the final tableau in Wire's Harvest released 70's Tripych and was the first Wire album to be released to a universal set of 5 star reviews from the British Rock Weeklies thus it represented the point when the British "pop culture establishment" publicly recognised Wire's primacy. "154 makes 95 percent of the competition look feeble" wrote Nick Kent in the NME ", "Wire are achieving a lot of things other-- and more recognised-- names have been striving for" wrote Chris [ read more ]
CD $14.99
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Read & Burn 03 is the first Wire release featuring entirely new material since 2003's Send. This 26-minute mini-album signals the stage-by-stage re-activation of the legendary and influential band as a recording and live entity. Read & Burn is the R&D series representing the state of Wire's art right now. Wire continues to evolve and offers here the fresh fruits of its latest development. It should be noted that tracks from Read & Burn 03 will not be included on the next album-- [ read more ]
CD $10.99
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Wire's return to full-time active duty came as something of a surprise. Colin Newman, Bruce Gilbert, and Graham Lewis (the latter two both separately and as the duo Dome) had been growing increasingly abstract and non-rock in the six years since the group had split up, but 1988's A Bell Is a Cup...Until It Is Struck is, at heart, an album full of pop songs. Admittedly, they're mainly peculiar pop songs full of stream-of-consciousness lyrics ("Money spine paper lung kidney bingos o [ read more ]
CD $11.38