March 26, 1998
Pink Flag is haiku carved on the skin of the comfortable middle class with a dagger. Wire's debut album is art-house punk of the highest order, their sound bristling with intelligence and brushing the avant-garde with its spare musical assault.
The term "minimalist" is often tossed around to hide the fact a band only knows one chord, but here the word applies for its inference: self-conscious artiness and brutally simple arrangements. Simple doesn't mean poorly played or dumb, though - just that Wire is a band of ideas before music, as "Field Day for the Sundays" demonstrates. Only 28 seconds long, it's a hilariously terse attack on the amoral appetite of the media for fresh scandal that needs no further elaboration. You've got two bursts of verses and a quick chorus - what, that's not enough? Wire makes their point and moves on.
Spiritual precursors to Gang of Four and the Minutemen, Wire rip through 22 songs in under 40 minutes. You won't feel cheated though, as the ideas that fuel the songs are fully realized and give plenty to think about after they whip past. And the music is more fleshed out than you'd think, as Wire's bare-boned arrangements leave plenty of space for the stylistic shifts of "Brazil", the claustrophobic "Reuters" and the full-throated rage of "Mr. Suit".
Wire do tense rhumba, metallic blues and early hardcore, all filtered through a lo-fi punk grind while Colin Newman yells out his oddly mathematical, clipped spoken-word vocals, railing against the bored, the pretentious and the powerful.
Their sound as stark as the cover, Wire attacks complacency in the anthemic "Ex-Lion Tamer" with the vicious sarcasm of the chorus: "Stay glued to your TV set!" They ponder sex, the military, paranoia and treat love as an odd philosophical concept while tearing through just enough dark melody to keep you humming. This is punk rock for your cerebellum - dig it.
- Jared O'Connor
Brutal minimalism