Wire - Red Barked Tree

Wire – Red Barked Tree 2.5/5

I think it was Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols that displayed such sentiments many years before him, but lead singer Colin Newman once said of Wire that their aim was “to destroy rock & roll, by removing the roll from it”. Now, over thirty years on from their landmark first three records, Wire, where once they eschewed their mainstream contemporaries, stand hand in hand with them. Most of these tracks don’t fall too far from FM radio fodder, though that’s not necessarily in itself a bad thing. Where this album does fail is in producing anything more than merely average. It was probably asking too much to expect a classic record from Wire at this point (for that see 1977’s Pink Flag or 1978’s Chairs Missing), but it would have been nice to get something that wasn’t quite so forgettable, or even something without such bloody awful lyrics (sample: “A dirty cartoon duck covers the village in shit, possibly signalling the end of western civilisation").

Of the eleven tracks on Wire’s twelfth studio album, “Two Minutes” comes closest to emulating their formative sound, but it is on the chiming sheen of the title track and the spiralling, punky “A Flat Tent” and “Smash” that Wire sound their closest to interesting. This is surprising, as their best work of late came on the far more abrasive “Read and Burn” series of EPs from a few years ago. Perhaps Wire are finding that there comes a point when angry young men can’t be angry or young any more.

Download: Smash