The career of Wire, frontman Colin Newman once proudly announced, is “a one-way trip”. It’s not an idle boast. On stage today, you might get one song from their “classic” 70s albums or their first reunion in the 80s, but it’s best not to book a ticket under that assumption: whole tours have gone by where Wire barely acknowledged they had a past at all.
It’s an approach that’s infected the music they make. If Mind Hive were the debut by a hot new band, you suspect what’s left of the music press would be doing their nut over it. It feels sinewy and stripped back, precise and pop-facing even on its roomiest tracks. Hung rests on one chord for eight minutes, but the vocal melody that weaves around it is so strong, you hardly notice. One of its signature sounds is a kind of tightly controlled chaos – corrosively distorted guitars and feedback hemmed in by tense rhythms and some of the most straightforwardly beautiful tunes Wire have ever come up with. The other is more lushly electronic, vaguely recalling the moments on Brian Eno’s Before and After Science when he pressed his ambient experiments into the service of gorgeous, hazy ballads.
The loveliest of the latter category is Mind Hive’s closing track, Humming, which, with an impressive degree of perversity, uses its drowsy synth textures and echoing guitars to support a lyric that prickles with anxiety: at the rise of political populism, alleged Russian interference in elections, the creeping dread that things may have changed not merely for the worse, but irrevocably so. In fact, there’s no mistaking the sense of fear that runs through vast swathes of Mind Hive. Cactused depicts the world as starkly, implacably divided, a longstanding obsession with the way reality can be distorted – “the problems of bad reception resulting in blurred perception,” as 1978’s French Film Blurred put it – retooled for the adversarial world of social media: “it’s a throw-down, it’s a tag-team angle, it’s a face-off, it’s a cheap low-blow.” Shadows is even grimmer: a vocal evenly relating an incident of apparently state-sanctioned mass murder, set once again to music that’s weirdly charming in its simplicity.
It’s the strange, appealing sound of a band doggedly following their own path, eyes fixed forward.
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