Wire
Red Barked Tree

THE REVIEW

What does maturity mean?

I must have written forty-seven bits of nonsense before opting for this opening. Forty-seven bits of nonsense, probably always circling around the same concept: maturity. And always circling around it, but evidently unknowingly. That's why in the end I opted for this opening rather than one of the forty-seven nonsense bits.

Simplifying the question, one can easily say what maturity is not. Maturity is not exhausted, nor old. But neither are its polar opposites: lively, sparkling, frenetic, inflamed, and, concerning old, young.

So perhaps maturity is the perfect balance. The imperturbability of being above the fray. Being beyond good and evil (like the girl, in Stewartian memory, born on a ray of sound). Scanning one's past with a smile and turning the glimpse of the eye to the future without feeling fear. It is the serene awareness of oneself in the present. Boh.

In short, past, present, future. Let's forget the past. Let's pretend that Wire's first three albums never existed. To contemplate a comparison with That triad would be detrimental, not only for a good album as the one (more or less) discussed here, but for a range of other titles, published by numerous other names over the course of these last thirty-plus years that have separated Wire from past glory. It would be like comparing a diamond to crystal.

Also forget the exasperated evolution(?) of their return to the scene after their longest absence ("Send"). An "evolution" celebrating the sharpest glories of the past but emphasized, polished, and revised for our grim days. Forget them. Because in the reddened stripped tree, the arts students who saved punk while the Pistols asked God to save the immortal Elizabeth II and her nation have realized they are no longer twenty, are fully aware they are not dinosaurs, and because this is probably their album of maturity - assuming one excludes, as mentioned, the elusive initial explosive triptych already born mature. Actually, old, and even twenty years old. It is curious that generally such a saying has a "derogatory" connotation. Being born old is a virtue. It means always being a step ahead of others. A step ahead of those who were born two or three years earlier, should be able to walk, but you are already a step ahead.
In short, neither old nor exhausted - indeed, there are no lack of daring moments such as (above all) Two Minutes and Moreover -, just balanced right. This is the word: balanced.

Paraphrasing a large swath of the critical buzz, it is a kind of "stylistic best of" made up of unreleased tracks in step with the times. And the stylistic identity of this band has always been that of those who cannot be assigned an identity, those who are free from precise labels. What has distinguished the cream of this band's work has been the courage, the versatility, and the ability that propelled them to combine these two qualities and destroy the form, to recompose two, three, four new and unheard forms; to destroy the song form, to twist it in every sense, and bring out semen, liters of semen. And this semen we find grown-up, formed, and consistent with what was intended more than thirty years ago. Whether in the pop attitude of the melancholic Adapt or in the more caustic moments.

I had said it wouldn't make sense to look back. I had vowed not to get lost in pointless historical references and comparisons between past and present, diamond and crystal. But one quality, even if they have nothing to do with each other, cannot fail to associate the diamond with the crystal: the brightness.