Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The end of Harvest-era & post-punk masterpiece, 13 Feb 2006
The philosophy of 1978's 'I am the Fly' which dismissed punk and cast Wire as punk-spirited outsiders in a blurred French Film of their own was carried on into the great 'Chairs Missing' LP. Late 1978 saw the band shift again, the effect of touring and travel excerting an influence over the material - which came in various origins - Lewis writing on his own, Gilbert writing on his own, Newman writing on his own...and the odd collaboration between members (the e.p. included with this album and on later reissues is effectively solo-work from each member).The band seem at odds with each other at odds with the world - so it was unsurprising they would disintegrate following the 'Document + Eyewitness' performance, resurfacing as a different (but same spirited) Wire on Mute-records in the mid-1980s. '154' was the conclusion of their years on a major label and another obligatory purchase.'154' remains for me their most complete LP, as great as many albums of this era - 'Unknown Pleasures', 'Metal Box', 'Cut', 'Secondhand Daylight','Entertainment!','Fear of Music', 'Dub Housing', 'The Only Fun in Town', 'The Scream' etc. Lewis' opener 'I Should Have Known Better' is a different kind of angular pop, a building melancholy reflected in the manic-guitars towards its climax. & it even uses the word 'albeit'! There are kind of pop songs here - 'The 15th' still sounds terminally sublime and was later covered by proto-Scissor-Sisters outfit Fischerspooner (essentially Sigue Sigue Sputnik with a smaller budget and a bit more taste) while 'Map Ref 41 N 93 W' (title!) is essentially catchy - setting the precedent for things like 'Eardrum Buzz' and 'Not Me'. Sadly it never became a hit when the record label opted to put their money behind reductive Japan-tribute outfit Duran Duran! There's an abiding melancholy here - B.C. Gilbert's 'Blessed State' an anti-National Anthem that always sounds pertinent with its refrain "oh what a perfect, what a well-made world." 'Two People in a Room' shows the angry punk thing wasn't completely erased - while 'A Mutal Friend' explores more oblique territories. 'The Other Window' is the missing link between Eno and hip-hop, opening as an ambient-guitar dirge with vocals from Gilbert, oblique chatter that becomes something else when an electro-beat kicks in! Newman's 'On Returning' is poppier, slight-pop not far from Talking Heads and some of the material found on his solo LP 'A/Z'. My two favourite tracks remain closer '40 Versions' which is Gilbert's guitar-dominated ode to entropic options ('total eclipse and Niagra falls'!) - the guitar itself is brilliant and could be cited as the birth of Interpol's career! Lyrically it feels somewhat sci-fi, reflected in the artwork the albums Wire released on Harvest and the feel of '154.' The epic 'A Touching Display' remains the other favourite, even longer than 1978's 'Mercy', Lewis' offers something that lyrically recalls (predicts to be accurate) Julian Cope's bombed-out state ('Wilder' to 'Fried') with music that sounds like Young Marble Giants playing Siouxsie & the Banshees. I love the way the vocals become more passionate, and then nothing - words not required anymore and the band drift off into drones and avant-solos. Math-rock could be argued to have stemmed from here, as well as things like Theoretical Girls and Slint then! '154' is a great album, the Harvest-trio is deservedly reissued - though I think the later/contemporary Wire-product should be celebrated, as well as material on Newman's Swim Label and various members releases as Colin Newman, He Said, A.C. Marias, and Wir. Highlight reissues of 2006 and records that may not have made much sense at the time, but more than work now.
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8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My God, they're so gifted!, 27 Mar 2006
1979 delivered three essential albums for me: PiL's Metal Box, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and 154, Wire's third studio LP (so-called because they had played 154 gigs by that time). Songs are generally longer than on the debut "Pink Flag", and the overall intensity and creepiness is cranked up by some serious excursions into weird sounds. Much of this must be due to producer Mike Thorne, who adds haunting synth and keyboard sounds that absolutely refuse to date and sound as mysterious today as the did then. This is best typified on "the Other Window", Lewis intoning a very English experience to being on a foreign train, culminating in seeing a dying horse trapped in a barbed wire fence. "he turned away/what could he do?/the other window had a...nicer view". Elsewhere, there's the usual Wire knack for conjuring a chiming, memorable pop-song such as the "15th", sounding like a malevolent Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. All very much in the manner of those other cerebral pop legends, Brian Eno & Howard Devoto. And "Two People in a Room" is one of the heaviest punk numbers they wrote. The version of 154 I have on CD also has 5 extra tracks; four are solo pieces originally included on a bonus 45 that came with the vinyl album, such as "Lets Panic Later" and "Small Electric Piece". Already, signs were brewing that the four could not simply exist as Wire for long but had to expand into extracurricular projects or solo careers. The fifth is "Go ahead", a 15 min piece they recorded for the John Peel Show. Look out for this version.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant...., 22 Jun 2009
Rating: 9.5/10
Best tracks: "The 15th", "Reference 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W", "Blessed State", "I Should Have Known Better", "On Returning", "Two People in a Room", "A Mutual Friend"
The fantastic third album from Wire, named 154 after the number of gigs the band had played to date, is as much a progression from Chairs Missing as that album was from Pink Flag. Astonishingly arranged and played, Wire created a cohesive, perfectly structured, half wholly accessible/half dazzlingly experimental and weird masterwork that's often totally hypnotic in the way it exudes an eerie, icy and dark atmosphere. Ironically, despite being the band's darkest and weirdest album, 154 contains two of their most accessible and melodically beautiful songs - "The 15th" is amazingly lush and really quite addictive, with glacial yet warm synthesisers adding hypnotic texture, while "Map Reference 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W" is one of those magnificent pop hits that never was, but one listen to it, with its itchy, restless rhythms, boundless, infectious energy and awesome, awesome chorus, and you'll weep for the charts loss. Briefer songs like "Two People in a Room" and "On Returning" are awesome, pounding and thrilling surges of ice-cold post-punk, which manage to sound both alien and yet thrillingly primal. The latter pulls the album back from the brink after the ultra-dark "A Touching Display" and boasts a dozen or so fantastic rhythmic touches and sonic embellishments. There's even melodic sweetness with "Blessed State", which has an almost cute, catchy feel, while the slowly uncoiling "A Mutual Friend" plays out in stately, beautiful style and really is quite lovely. Great ending for this song too!
The weirder tracks are really weird; "The Other Window" is less a song, more a spoken-word piece accompanied by chilly atmospherics, and it works, it really works! I'm using words like `chilly', `icy' and `glacial' a lot in this review, because 154 just feels cold-sounding, not cold as in remote, but cold as in its time to wrap up, because the music just seems to evoke a world of icicle-strewn catacombs with the vocals of Newman and Lewis like whispers, screams or murmurs from cavernous depths. The lengthy "A Touching Display", which closed the vinyl version's first side, is the strangest song on any of Wire's first three albums; what begins as dark yet relatively structured soon descends into pure atonal atmospherics. "Once is Enough" is a real belter, chaotic, frightening and very exciting, "Indirect Enquiries" frankly scary in the way it builds and builds towards a nightmarish climax. The closing "40 Versions" has a steady, robotic slow-groove with a great, eerie finish.
154 honestly gets even better the more I listen to it, with the smaller, seemingly minor tracks coming to merge magnificently with the more immediately vital songs to provide a surreal, wonderfully composed whole. In fact, you could say that Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154 form the ultimate post-punk journey - all three are essential albums, the latter two more so than their debut in my opinion, with 154 edging past its predecessor as the definitive, great Wire album.
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