Soundbites

Wire “Send” Pink Flag
Records

If anything Wire is in the same boat as Sonic Youth ““ it
consists of veteran rockers who are way too old to rock as hard as
they do, yet they pull it off better than the younger ones who
should (White Stripes, I’m looking in your direction). Like
Sonic Youth’s 2002 “Murray Street,”
“Send” captures the intense post-punk energy from
Wire’s days of yore and casts it in a nice modern sheen of
production. Still, the ingredients that made them underground
legends in the late ’70s are all present, including the
group’s strict aesthetic of repetitive chords and tight song
structures. Singer Colin Newman is practically buried in a
landslide of fuzz and beats. Highlights from the album, which were
released in halves as separate albums last year, include the
brooding opener, “In the Art of Stopping,” which lays
testament to the group’s most recent strengths. Not
interested in just recycling ideas of the past, the group’s
sound is infused with enough distortion and percussion to give it
an industrial edge. Wire’s songs may not be at the forefront
of current musical innovation, but for a band that is making such a
spirited comeback from its brightest days decades ago, you
can’t possibly call this recording an act of nostalgia.
-Andrew Lee

Blur “Think Tank” Virgin

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m exhausted from a weekend
spent in the desert sun, or maybe it’s the fact that Damon
Albarn ditched his guitarist and gave up on making interesting
music, but listening to “Think Tank” is annoying as all
hell. Sure, the fact that my head feels pretty heavy makes a case
for the former, but I’m pretty sure I can come up with plenty
of evidence in support of the latter as well. Everybody knows by
now that Albarn has been spending as much time as a cartoon primate
and a purveyor of world music as he has an elder Britpop statesman,
but with a new Blur album we should have been getting some
“Coffee and TV” and “Song 2.” This is not
the case. Instead Albarn takes the influences of his other projects
and waters them down. On the opening tracks “Ambulance”
and “Out of Time” he uses world music melodies and
instruments, but instead of masters from Mali helping him out,
it’s the other guys from Blur. What results is uninteresting
rock ‘n’ roll forcing the appropriation of world music
as poorly as anyone since Paul Simon circa “Rhythm of the
Saints.” Track 3, misguidedly titled “Crazy
Beat,” is a pedestrian mix of electronica and rock. After
working with Dan the Automator on Gorillaz you’d think Albarn
would recruit some great producers to work with Blur. This is not
the case. He brought in Fatboy Slim and William Orbit, and it
shows. Other flubs include a six-minute plus song called
“Jets” with a terminally boring saxophone solo over a
clunky rhythm. Though I’ve been doing it a lot lately I hate
to hate on once-fun British bands, but when they insist on making
such grating music I don’t have a choice, do I? -Anthony
Bromberg