Wire Pink Flag CD

Wire: Colin Newman (vocals, guitar); Graham Lewis (vocals, bass); B.C. Gilbert (guitar); Robert Gotobed (drums).
Additional personnel: Kate Lukas (flute); Dave Oberle (background vocals).
Perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk, Wire's Pink Flag plays like The Ramones Go to Art School -- song after song careens past in a glorious, stripped-down rush. However, unlike the Ramones, Wire ultimately made their mark through unpredictability. Very few of the songs followed traditional verse/chorus structures -- if one or two riffs sufficed, no more were added; if a musical hook or lyric didn't need to be repeated, Wire immediately stopped playing, accounting for the album's brevity (21 songs in under 36 minutes on the original version). The sometimes dissonant, minimalist arrangements allow for space and interplay between the instruments; Colin Newman isn't always the most comprehensible singer, but he displays an acerbic wit and balances the occasional lyrical abstraction with plenty of bile in his delivery. Many punk bands aimed to strip rock & roll of its excess, but Wire took the concept a step further, cutting punk itself down to its essence and achieving an even more concentrated impact. Some of the tracks may seem at first like underdeveloped sketches or fragments, but further listening demonstrates that in most cases, the music is memorable even without the repetition and structure most ears have come to expect -- it simply requires a bit more concentration. And Wire are full of ideas; for such a fiercely minimalist band, they display quite a musical range, spanning slow, haunting texture exercises, warped power pop, punk anthems, and proto-hardcore rants -- it's recognizable, yet simultaneously quite unlike anything that preceded it. Pink Flag's enduring influence pops up in hardcore, post-punk, alternative rock, and even Britpop, and it still remains a fresh, invigorating listen today: a fascinating, highly inventive rethinking of punk rock and its freedom to make up your own rules. [The original 1989 CD issue by Restless Retro features a bonus track, "Options R."] ~ Steve Huey
Wire's furious interpretation of punk was encapsulated on this primitive, minimalist debut. Abrasive and disjointed, these 21 tracks exude a fury impossible to ignore and one enhanced by their very brevity. Tracks halt, sometimes abruptly, when the point has been made, creating an ever-changing melange of sound and texture. While generally aggressive, Pink Flag also boasts two wonderful pop songs ('Ex-Lion Tamer' and 'Mannequin'), suggesting that Wire would not be constrained by stylistic expectations. The album's mixture of polemics and pointedness would influence several US groups, including R.E.M., who later covered 'Strange'. Its perceptive urgency grows with time.Spin (p.58) - Ranked #7 in Spin's "The 10 Best Reissues of 2006" -- "These 21 squalling miniatures are post-punk's first great bow shot."
Spin (5/01, p.108) - Ranked #2 in Spin's "50 Most Essential Punk Records" - "...Britain's Ramones....Call it the birth of art-punk: oblique, corrosive, itchy-catchy microsongs by pissy outsiders..."
Q (5/02 SE, p.144) - Included in Q's "100 Best Punk Albums".
Q (9/94, p.131) - 3 Stars - Good - "...as tight and covertly tuneful as The Buzzcocks, minus the hormonal longing....Cheap, but never dumb..."
Uncut (p.106) - 5 stars out of 5 -- "Big-Bang-like in its density, and already pregnant with the possibilities they would later realise....Brilliantly devised..."
Magnet (p.91) - "The distilled melodies, cast-iron guitar tones and ultra-basic rhythms hold up today better than almost anything else from the class of '77..."
Mojo (Publisher) (3/03, p.76) - Ranked #24 in Mojo's "Top 50 Punk Albums" - "...Their debut sounded like nothing before - sparse, nervy, emotionally repressed, full of memorable hooks..."
NME (Magazine) (9/18/93, p.19) - Ranked #31 in NME's list of the 'Greatest Albums Of The '70s.'
NME (Magazine) (10/2/93, p.29) - Ranked #77 in NME's list of the 'Greatest Albums Of All Time.'