Album Review

Wire – Red Barked Tree

• 17th Jan 2011

There are lots of post-punk bands which from the initial era of the late 1970s have not stood the test of time, Wire are the exception to this rule.

Their new album Red Barked Tree is not in the least bit dated in any way and could be a worthy album, whether cutting their teeth or, as they are now, cutting their 12th album. They do this with the kind of freshness you will find in a newly opened bottle of milk, given that their music is both wholesome and tasteful.

The album is brought to life with the aggressively toned Please Take, a song about betrayal and hurt. Aggression seems to be the tone of the record with Two Minutes being a tirade of noise and feedback. They give the album the edge which would otherwise be lacking. However there exists a sense of melancholy with each bar of music opening up a new wound of feeling. One example of this is Clay which is moulded together with its easy rhyming couplets.

The real standout is Moreover a pumping, a white-noise and fuzz celebration of exuberance. This seems childlike in the sense of energy and excitement – the kind of feeling you might give with a packet of high-in-sugar sweets. The infectiousness of this joy spreads rapidly to the rest of the record as the minutes and seconds are now chomped up with the 1980s-esque deliverance.

Wire are not The Fall and it is slightly lazy of me to make such a comparison, but looking at latter band’s album of a few years back, Fall Heads Roll has that extra punch which this album lacks. This is not a bad album, far from it, but is just not a classic album.