Pink

undefined

Product description ------------------- Classic postpunk album. Perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk, Wire's Pink plays like The Ramones Go to Art School -- song after song careens past in a glorious, stripped-down rush. However, unlike the Ramones, Wire ultimately made their mark through unpredictability. Very few of the songs followed traditional verse/chorus structures -- if one or two riffs sufficed, no more were added; if a musical hook or lyric didn't need to be repeated, Wire immediately stopped playing, accounting for the album's brevity (21 songs in under 36 minutes on the original version). The sometimes dissonant, minimalist arrangements allow for space and interplay between the instruments; Colin Newman isn't always the most comprehensible singer, but he displays an acerbic wit and balances the occasional lyrical abstraction with plenty of bile in his delivery. Many punk bands ed to strip rock & roll of its excess, but Wire took the concept a step further, cutting punk itself down to its essence and achieving an even more concentrated impact. Some of the tracks may seem at first like underdeveloped sketches or fragments, but further listening demonstrates that in most cases, the music is memorable even without the repetition and structure most ears have come to expect -- it simply requires a bit more concentration. And Wire are full of ideas; for such a fiercely minimalist band, they display quite a musical range, spanning slow, haunting texture exercises, warped power pop, punk anthems, and proto-hardcore rants -- it's recognizable, yet simultaneously quite unlike anything that preceded it. Pink 's enduring influence pops up in hardcore, post-punk, alternative rock, and even Britpop, and it still remains a fresh, invigorating listen today: a fascinating, highly inventive rethinking of punk rock and its freedom to make up your own rules. [The original 1989 CD issue by Restless Retro features a bonus track, "Options R." .com ---- There are myriad details that illustrate why Wire's 1977 debut is bulletproof--or at least wildly compelling. There's the count of tracks--21 to be exact--the snare-cracked pulsing roll of "Reuters," which sports one of punk's greatest first lines: "Our own correspondent is sorry to tell of an uneasy time, that all is not well." There's the six songs that last under a minute (and at least that many more that last under a minute and a half), all of them urgently poised on Colin Newman's deadpan urgency--a laconic riposte to the shouting that in '77 was already central to punk. There's album closer "12XU," which Minor Threat would make anthemic in their short hardcore-forging career. Pink was made after Wire had played a mere 15 gigs, honing their sound in the atelier of the Clash, Sex Pistols, Ramones, etc. without sounding a smidge like anyone else. Importantly, it's the band itself that got rights to remaster this flawless gem, in a cool gatefold digipak with a fascinating liner essay. That's something you don't see many punks do. --Andrew Bartlett