Wire
154

THE REVIEW

Just like the duality that permeates the representative texture of new wave, its irreducible Gefüge, so too 154 by Wire, especially when listened to today after its challenging sedimentation in the collective imagination, reveals its undeniable, consubstantial dichotomic dimension.

On one hand, the masterpiece emerges as an anamorphic "material" unfolding (aided by the annihilating plastic allure of the quartet's sound), as a sprawling and synesthetic immersion of punk into industrial experimentation. On the other, it’s a programmatic operation of rejuvenation and refounding of rock, as a lucid metalinguistic inference. Its hermetic “soul” is felt through that quality, which we might call pervasive but never invasive hyperrealism, austere composure, no waste of notes, by virtue of which every line, every segment of the work refers to a precise and convincing idea of the perception of the sensible that, though supra-empirical and ultra-realistic, is perfectly superimposable to the phenomenal.
The demiurgic audacity, the absolute manipulativeness (the abyssal profusion of crossfades, the pinpoint use of significant detail) becomes the natural absolute. The postmodern screen finds in this music the most antonomastic of concretizations.

154 is the Zeitgeist at a low degree of formalization, punk treated in a serial bric-a-brac workshop, a caravanserai of the heteroclite, 154 generations enslaved by perishable matter. It amazes for its effective and compact impression of reality, also amazes for the airy freedom of its experiments, for the disruptive glaciality of its cadences, for the pagan vigor of its figures. Supreme and definitive declaration of poetics, elaborate authorial cogitation, it also perplexes for the generous abundance of its cultural references: partly a cyberpunk declination, partly a theoretical variation on Lang's romance, 154 is an aqueous anabasis of massive doses of Stirnerian mysticism and a piling up of Oedipal echoes. But it is above all an extreme attempt to give life, through a heart of darkness, to a music balancing between decadent ambitions and alien immensity, between anti-spectacular virtuosic display and intellectual grandeur. A solid and prismatic body which is not harmed, in the current length, by the psychologistic digressions and the powerful Jungian suggestion linked to the key concept of shadow.