Wire
Send

"Rebellion today no longer makes sense, everything is allowed, everything is granted, there is nothing left to rebel against, only to rebel against too much permissiveness remains, in short, a reverse conservatism, where the young people will interpret it and no longer the elderly parents" (Colin Newman)

The Wire of 2003 are a band 20 years ahead, the Wire of 1979 were a band 20 years ahead, the Wire are one of the most ingenious bands ever, elegant, menacing, dark and furious: we had left them with the masterpiece 154 of 1979, after the brief appearances in the 80s. This is the album that marks their powerful and astonishing reentry into the music scene, and they do it with Send, an impressive document so vital that some of today's bands should pay it homage.
We put the CD in the player and everything becomes clearer, the pounding and frenetic techno punk dance of certain tracks exceeds the allowed BPM limit, but they do it with intention, not just to break our eardrums, Wire don't flood the already saturated music market unless they have something important to say. Out of nowhere, they come out with an incandescent monolith of extraterrestrial matter that isn't quite rock, but is the only rock possible today. The sense of contemporary claustrophobia is incredible, Alec Empire and Trent Reznor have everything to learn from these 11 tracks of the masters. I won't speak about individual songs, as they are so uniform, I'll just say that in the central part of the album it feels like sinking into an epileptic nightmare of brain-damaged Venetians just out of a rave, a hallucinatory industrial punk absolutely disarming in its cybernetic linearity, the end of 99.9 is oppressive, alien, and full of primal fears (alien, or human, you choose).
Today, in 2004, instead of 154 we have discos. Fill yourselves with synthetic drugs and smart drugs, smoke, alcohol, and endure for 4 hours that tum tum tum para tum tum tum para tum tum tum... you're not suffering (you're having fun... yes yes, pretend you're having fun, do it for your group of friends at least or for your woman eheheh who would also have fun in the midst of a nuclear attack eheheh)... you'll vomit... you won't see anything anymore... a headache then... you won't understand a damn thing anymore... tum tum tum para tum tum tum... that monotonous sound. Run home for a sleep and you'll be ready to endure the most monotonous of weeks... Send circumvents all this with the superior class of these 4 middle-aged gentlemen: Colin Newman cynical and punk disaffected even at 50, Graham Lewis increasingly ambiguous and dark like in the past, Gilbert's guitar always avant-garde, and Gobelard's amazing metronomy.
For those who love agitated, frenetic and violent (but artistic) music, this album will give them carnal chills of the type “Take flight, drag me with you”, but it would be enough to just love Wire not to reject this statement of brilliant intent from these 4 fifty-year-olds.
Where do Wire want to take us? Maybe they want to make the rave generation perceive what is the saving path of the eightfold way without leaving the culture of raves and excess?

Epic and sacred solemnity of a breakbeat that leads inexorably to trepidation. The black, dark and opaque like coffee grounds, the anguish, moldy gray, the plastic, excremental brown, rancid cream, the flight, the color of the soul's discharges, the dance. Fragmentations and solos, the electronic circuits, abysses of meaning. Life requires illusions that support existence (can the breakbeat be the illusion that supports fun and ecstasy of a life?). A million cars made of natural rubber and ghosts, a million young and wasted rave-boys and girls wasted at night and good kids by day, gathered for the massacre on 114th street for the love of an old occupied factory transformed into a rave party, the commercial voice of soaps, the mannequins of the toothpastes on television screens, deodorants on hypnotic chairs, drip of paralyzing gas on the radio, all this is Send.

Wire wanted to astonish and they succeeded. I will wait anxiously for the next word from the masters, I will wait even 10 years.