5.4
I don't want to call the post-punk masters "washed out", but I just might have to. It's a sad thing. It always is. It has been about three decades since Wire's masterful punk debut Pink Flag. Wire's intensity, simplicity, and pure sense of what they were doing has never been matched since. Now on Wire's twelfth studio album Wire goes for exasperated melodies, weak vocals, even weaker lyricism, and an overall bore of an album.
Simplicity is ironically a hard art in music to use effectively. Only a couple of artists have mastered this art. Wire is one of them, but as they processed in their career they moved to more of an art-pop sound that has been a hit and miss. On Red Barked Tree the melodies that Wire attempts to put out are overly simple and don't create the earthy resonance of Pink Flag, instead they create dull, uninspiring lines that fail.
The effects that go into the vocals create an echo and double layering effect that just is not right. The most enjoyable track on the LP, "Two Minutes", has that furious tenacity that Wire is known for with no cheesy vocal effects. If lead man Colin Newman stayed on the path of the snarling, menacing classic vocals of "Two Minutes", then Red Barked Tree could have definitely been something.
Now you have Red Barked Tree's absolutely atrocious lyricism. Colin Newman sings rhymes just to rhyme. "The overcrowded nature of things," Newman sings on "Bad Worn Things" probably one of the worst Wire songs of all time. The over all lyricism just sounds so awkward and unnatural. Usually I'm not that big on lyrics, but Red Barked Tree's are so bad that it increasingly aggravated me and made me dislike the album more and more. Again, "Two Minutes" has the most interesting lyricism on the whole album with cryptic lines like "Possibly signaling the end of Western civilization" and "Offering the age of fragmentation", it's those cryptic and symbolic lyrics that Newman offered on their debut and following successful albums that made Wire such a post-punk powerhouse.
Red Barked Tree is not the Wire anyone is looking for. Instead it is a boring, messy, uninspiring LP that does no justice to the great memories of the fantastic Pink Flag or Chairs Missing. New listeners of Wire might or might not enjoy this one, I really can't tell since I'm a huge Wire fan. I hate saying it, but Wire is most definitely washed out.
Sample:
Simplicity is ironically a hard art in music to use effectively. Only a couple of artists have mastered this art. Wire is one of them, but as they processed in their career they moved to more of an art-pop sound that has been a hit and miss. On Red Barked Tree the melodies that Wire attempts to put out are overly simple and don't create the earthy resonance of Pink Flag, instead they create dull, uninspiring lines that fail.
The effects that go into the vocals create an echo and double layering effect that just is not right. The most enjoyable track on the LP, "Two Minutes", has that furious tenacity that Wire is known for with no cheesy vocal effects. If lead man Colin Newman stayed on the path of the snarling, menacing classic vocals of "Two Minutes", then Red Barked Tree could have definitely been something.
Now you have Red Barked Tree's absolutely atrocious lyricism. Colin Newman sings rhymes just to rhyme. "The overcrowded nature of things," Newman sings on "Bad Worn Things" probably one of the worst Wire songs of all time. The over all lyricism just sounds so awkward and unnatural. Usually I'm not that big on lyrics, but Red Barked Tree's are so bad that it increasingly aggravated me and made me dislike the album more and more. Again, "Two Minutes" has the most interesting lyricism on the whole album with cryptic lines like "Possibly signaling the end of Western civilization" and "Offering the age of fragmentation", it's those cryptic and symbolic lyrics that Newman offered on their debut and following successful albums that made Wire such a post-punk powerhouse.
Red Barked Tree is not the Wire anyone is looking for. Instead it is a boring, messy, uninspiring LP that does no justice to the great memories of the fantastic Pink Flag or Chairs Missing. New listeners of Wire might or might not enjoy this one, I really can't tell since I'm a huge Wire fan. I hate saying it, but Wire is most definitely washed out.
Sample:
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