Wire – Red Barked Tree – Pinkflag (pf18) - ****

Even when first pedalling short sharp Seventies shocks Wire were essentially conceptual artists, sculpting minimal cubist punk.
Thirty-five years later, all pushing sixty, their third album this century seems to be a typically tidy modern rock record, albeit one that also unfolds within invisible inverted commas. The Artful Dodger dropped aitches of old are replaced with neutralised, classless vowels.
Everything sounds pitch-shifted to perfection.
Moreover recalls Wire's original noise-burst blueprint, Please Take purloins the tasteful glacial pop of their Eighties incarnation, and Adapt sports an unashamedly affecting descending chord sequence a more austere Wire might once have thought mawkish. Still they evolve.

(9/1/11)