Wire

Wire of 2015 are every bit as obstinate as the band dodging bottles on the Electric Ballroom's stage 35 years ago. Now in their 60s, they could be doing what most artists of their vintage do, cravenly basking in the glory of their past: it's hard not to think they'd be playing bigger venues if they'd only knuckle down and play I Am the Fly and 12XU every night. But they won't. If they're not quite as unyielding as they were in the 80s - when they refused to play anything they'd recorded in the previous decade, hiring a Wire tribute band as support act instead - you still get through an entire Wire gig these days without hearing a note of the music that made them famous. Their career, frontman Colin Newman recently remarked, is "a one-way trip". As in 1980, they keep doggedly moving on, but the difference between the Wire of Document and Eyewitness and the Wire of 2015 is that the former clearly had no real clue where to go, whereas the latter are teeming with ideas, none of which involve shouting random letters over percussion or attacking a gas stove.

You can see just how sure-footed Wire currently seem in everything from their 14th studio album's definitive, eponymous title to the taut, sharp songs it contains: honed and refined through years of the band playing them live instead of I Am the Fly or 12XU. Wire's sound has always rested on the intriguing tension between, on the one hand, a desire to experiment and conceptualise and, on the other, Newman's pop sensibility, his urge for simplicity and his enduring love of late-60s British psychedelia, the balance between the two constantly shifting. It's tempting to say that on Wire, the latter aspect of the band has the upper hand: at risk of infuriating a band so dedicated to forging ahead, it's worth pointing out that, at its most laid-back, the album's atmosphere feels not unlike that conjured on their gentle, Syd Barrettish 1978 single Outdoor Miner.

- The Guardian