Eerie Jagged Noir Blues from Austin’s Sideshow Tragedy

Sometimes it boils down to cred. The presence of Dimestore Dance Band’s noir gypsy guitar mastermind Jack Martin on Austin band the Sideshow Tragedy‘s album Persona instantly makes it worth a listen – it’s up at their Bandcamp page. For anybody who likes the idea of the Black Keys but finds them impossibly tame, the Sideshow Tragedy will not disappoint: they are the real deal. They’re upstairs at Bowery Electric, guessing at around 10 PM on May 15 and then at Zirzamin at 10 on May 17. If dark twisted surreal country blues is your thing, this will hook you up for the duration. Frontman/guitarist Nathan Singleton took the entire blues dictionary, distilled it, lined it up down the bar and then did shots of it until he had the whole thing in his system. And then recorded this album, for the most part just with drummer Jeremy Harrell. It’s like the Gun Club, but more raw, or like Dylan at his most haphazard and interesting – and funny. Singleton’s wry sense of humor is a welcome change from all dese wotbo blueschillun who done take da blues so serious, uh huh – there’s none of that blackface BS here.

Another cool thing about this record is that aside from Martin’s jagged guitar on the haunting, Otis Rush-influenced fifth track, The Bet, the rest of the album is all Singleton. He’s a one-man blues army, sometimes wailing with a slide, sometimes fingerpicking, sometimes slashing and roaring as he builds a doomed, menacing ambience. The album’s opening track, AM in Chicago sets the tone, an evil, reverb-drenched roadhouse vamp over tumbling drums: “A structure fire in the tower of song, a prisoner’s wish before he’s gone.” That the Leonard Cohen reference isn’t absurdly out of place speaks for itself.

“If you won’t believe me, I’ll keep telling you lies,” Singleton smirks over tasty layers of steady, shuffling slide guitar on Gasoline, then adds a sly, funky edge that reminds of Jon Spencer on the pulsing Something to Do. If there’s anything here you could call a hit single, it’s the wickedly catchy Satellite, bringing in a rare, upbeat major-key vibe.

Vasseline is a swirling, Steve Wynn style desert rock stomp. The title track, a snide portrait of a status-grubbing groupie type, opens with bit of feedback, early 70s stoner metal throuth the prism of punk, and then goes scampering. The exasperated I’m Gonna Be Your Man has distant echoes of the early Yardbirds and cool reverb on the vocals and the drums. The album winds up with the menacingly swaying Long Way Down, a hypnotic Howlin’ Wolf style groove, resonator guitar carrying the brooding tune over a wash of eerie distortion.

Art Brut Join the Nostalgia Parade

Nostalgia always leaves out the good stuff. Ever notice how 60s nostalgia always conveniently neglects how central a role opposition to the Vietnam War played in that era’s music? Outside of CBGB coffee table books (how NOT punk is that?) and never-ending tours by bands like Agent Orange or the Subhumans (who are at Bowery Ballroom on 6/15 and  the Music Hall of Williamsburg on 6/16), who outside of a crowd of diehard individualists remembers first-wave punk bands like those two? And isn’t it funny that the first wave of 90s nostalgia, like the Breeders’ recent comeback, looks back to the earliest part of that decade, or even to the 80s?  Is this a generational thing, a twenty-year cycle…or a reflection of how forgettable so much of the 90s’ ostensibly most popular music was? And there’s more to come: zeros nostalgia is next in line.

Although those who spent that decade across the pond might disagree, the European corporate music conglomerate took longer to drown itself in dreck than it did here in the US: good bands like Pulp and Blur spent a lot of time on Top of the Pops. Which the Brits take very seriously, or at least used to: let’s not forget that American Idol was a spinoff of the long-running Eurovision competition. That fascination with pop-charts-as-spectacle springboarded the career of Art Brut. A cynic would ask how many songs they ever made after the surprise 2004 hit Formed a Band: the answer is on the new Art Brut retrospective – imagine that! – appropriately titled Top of the Pops. Forty tracks, including one by Art Brut “franchise” band We Are Scientists (one of a friendly network who dedicate themselves to keeping the Art Brut catalog alive in concert). Defiantly blue-collar, sometimes to the point of self-parody, frontman Eddie Argos’ tongue-in-cheek, wide-eyed persona fuels the songs’ irrepressibly cynical sense of meta.

It’s funny how quaint so many of these songs are, even though the band is still active. Pump Up the Volume has a guy taking a break from making out with a girl so he can turn up the radio. My Little Brother “only listens to b-sides.” Nag Nag Nag Nag has a kid escaping the drudgery of home, his “album collection reduced to a mixtape” for travel purposes. Sideways references to decades of radio hits pervade these songs: the riff from Cool Jerk, allusions to ZZ Top, the Beach Boys (or the Clash parodying the Beach Boys), oi punk and especially Wire (a cynic would say Elastica instead). Ian Catskillkin and Jasper Future’s guitars (not to neglect founding member Chris Chinchilla on the early stuff) buzz and roar and are surprisingly tuneful despite themselves. As the band grew up, you can watch the humor extend to the music: wry harmonics and phasers and other effects make their appearances, more or less to mask the band’s musical limitations. What other group would have set a song about Guns & Roses’ brain-damaged vocalist to a Joy Division bassline?

Is 40 tracks of Art Brut overkill? For a band that was basically a lark from the git-go, maybe – although what’s most impressive is how strong, and funny, the satire is throughout most of this. DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshakes’ kitsch-obsessed trendoid, the snooty Strokes wannabes in Demons Out! and the Jarvis Cocker wannabe in Sexy Sometimes all get a karmic kick in the ass. And Alcoholics Unanimous is just a great song, one that needed to be written and a good thing that it was Art Brut who did it. How ironic it is that a band formed as a spoof of the pop music machine would become one of the very last to ride that machine to any kind of genuine success.

A Month’s Worth of Nightcrawling, Part Two

Funny how this blog started out covering live music almost exclusively, then within weeks the torrents of albums began and never stopped. Remember when everyone was saying that the album was a thing of the past? Now you can record an album with your phone, and everybody’s doing it. There’s a pile – or a virtual pile – of more than fifty of them patiently waiting their turn here. And they’ll have to wait another day because today is part two of catching up on all the shows from the past couple of weeks or so.

Lorraine Leckie is as comfortable with elegant, brooding chamber pop as she is at unhinged noir Americana rock. Her most recent show at the big room at the Rockwood last month featured the former. Then headlining Sunday Salon 26 at Zirzamin this past week, Leckie and her band the Demons were at the absolute peak of their game, slashing and burning through a mix of retro glamrock, surreal downtown NYC narratives and an unhinged version of Ontario, her sideways Canadian gothic salute to her birthplace. At the Rockwood, pianist Matt Kanelos added a nonchalant menace to several of Leckie’s collaborations with Anthony Haden-Guest (from the duo’s recent, excellent collaboration, Rudely Interrupted), especially on Bliss, a cruelly sarcastic portrait of a marriage gone irreparably wrong. At Zirzamin, guitarist Hugh Pool fired off machinegunning riffage that evoked Hendrix without being slavishly derivative or drowning out the vocals. Harmony vocalist Banjo Lisa amped up the songs’ allusive menace, blending bewitchingly with Leckie’s ever-increasingly full-throated wail.

The following Saturday night, Kanelos was at Littlefield playing in his duo project, Ghosts in the Ocean with Coney Island noir siren Carol Lipnik, who continues to move further toward the avant garde. One perceptive musician in the crowd likened their hypnotically minimalist performance to a cross between early Jane Siberry and Philip Glass, and she was right on the money, other than that Lipnik has a four-octave range and uses every inch of it. The two reinvented Leonard Cohen’s Gypsy Wife as Radiohead-inflected art-rock, then Lipnik employed a magical theremin-like vibrato on a mesmerizing version of Harry Nilsson’s Lifeline. They brought out every ounce of menace in Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat, turned Nick Drake’s Black Dog Blues into an even more haunting, skeletal sketch – that dog is a lethal predator – and moved through Richard Thompson’s The Great Valerio with a bell-like, funereal pulse, Lipnik going down into the sinister depths of her low register. But it was the originals – the catchy, anthemic Sonadora Dreaming, the defiantly insistent Crows and the disarmingly sarcastic Oh the Tyranny – that were the most memorable. They’re at Zirzamin after the Sunday Salon this coming June 16 at 7 PM

Pete Galub followed them, playing the album release show for his fantastic new one, Candy Tears. Galub brings world-class, dangerous guitar chops to classic powerpop, with an often frenetic, menacingly noisy edge – the Steve Wynn influence has made itself more and more clear in his music in recent years. Appropriately, he had Wynn’s guitar sparring partner Jason Victor as a guest on the album’s next-to-last track (they played the whole thing through, in order). And counterintuitively, after he and Galub had reduced the song to a toxic, molten mess of overtones and raging reverb, Victor led the band back in with gentle washes of major chords. Before that, the songs ranged from what sounded like Yo La Tengo doing XTC, Roscoe Ambel doing the Beatles, Guided by Voices doing Syd Barrett, and on a suspensefully skeletal version of the album’s gorgeous title track, Wire doing Big Star. In over an hour onstage, Galub made his notes count, choosing his spots – space is just as important in his music as the actual notes. Guest Karen Mantler played plaintive art-rock piano on the bittersweetly psychedelic 300 Days in July; Greta Gertler lent her soaring multi-octave voice to one of the later numbers. Drummer Chris Moore swung the backbeats while bassist Tom Gavin varied his attack from growly and slinky to a deep, anchoring pocket that held the center while Galub plotted where he was going to go next. Galub is at Zirzamin after the Sunday Salon on May 19 at 7.

Hem Plays a Show to Get Lost In at Bowery Ballroom

Chauvinistic as this is to say, Hem always seem to play their best shows in New York. As frontwoman Sally Ellyson was quick to acknowledge Saturday night at Bowery Ballroom, it didn’t hurt that they had a full eight-piece contingent onstage including drummer Mark Brotter, pedal steel wizard Bob Hoffnar and violinist Heather Zimmerman along with keyboardist Dan Messe, guitarist/mandolinists Steve Curtis and Gary Maurer, bassist George Rush and guest Dawn Landes on backing vocals, glockenspiel and percussion. Midway through their current tour, they seemed happy (well, as happy as this band gets) to be back on their home turf and rewarded a hushed, adoring crowd with an almost thirty-song set that went on well past the two-hour mark.

Enchanting as Ellyson’s voice is on the band’s new album Departure & Farewell, she reminded that she’s even better live, transcending some hiccups in the Bowery’s usually reliable PA system during the first three songs. She sent a shout out to her Brooklyn homwtown with a poignant version of Tourniquet, Hoffnar lighting up Hotel Fire with a simmering steel solo as he would do on most of the other more country-flavored material. Reservoir built vividly to a soaring, harmony-drenched chorus out of Curtis’ nimble fingerpicking. Ellyson led the band into a plaintive, longing turnaround, reinventing Johnny Cash’s Jackson as early 60s noir.

Zimmerman’s edgy lines were a welcome presence, especially on bittersweet takes of The Seed and Strays, while Curtis fired off one of the night’s best solos on acoustic guitar on the “self-deprecatory love song” Stupid Mouth Shut. Ellyson and Messe teamed up for rapt, gorgeous duo versions of Traveler’s Song and Almost Home, while the whole band ramped up an epic art-rock intensity on the new album’s lush title track as well as the last of the encores, So Long. The night’s most intense moments came midway through, “the death segment,” as Ellyson called it: a brooding take of My Father’s Waltz, anonchalantly chilling version of Walking Past the Graveyard and then the murder ballad Carry Me Home, rooted in Messe’s gospel-infused piano. The high point of the night, appropriately enough, was Not California, its narrator ill at ease with the wave of clueless second-wave gentrifiers hot on her tail, foreshadowing total annihilation. The band also debuted We’ll Meet Along the Way, a new number – “our death metal song,” as Ellyson termed it – with the night’s most brooding, overtly menacing melody. Hem return to the road on June 1 at the Sinclair in Cambridge, Massachusetts before heading further south. Keep up with Hem’s archive.org channel to see if any enterprising soul had the presence of mind to record the show: if so, it’s a keeper.

A Roaring, Haunting, Angst-Fueled New Album from Shannon Wright

One of the most distinctive and purposeful guitarists around, Shannon Wright has a new album, In Film Sound, due out May 7. It’s every bit as dark and intense as you would hope for. Wright’s world-weary, exhausted vocals channel doom and despair over overtone-drenched, buzzing, roaring sheets of poisonous lead-grey guitar sonics. Millions of bands have tried in vain to capture the surreal menace that Sonic Youth immortalized on Daydream Nation but this album achieves it. Wright’s writing is a lot more succinct and lyrically focused than Moore, Ranaldo & Co.: the presence of a defiant, mud-splattered young PJ Harvey towers over many of these songs.

The opening track sets the stage with its layers of guitar, absolutely satanic, chromatic central hook and tricky rhythms. The Caustic Light reminds of Randi Russo with its hypnotic, vamping verse and overtone-drenched chorus. Tax the Patients works the political as personal, and vice versa, evilly trumpeting guitar buildling to a prickly, circular waltz theme. As it reaches fever pitch, Wright’s mantra is “try to accept this just a bit longer.” But do we have to?

Who’s Sorry Now sets what could be either keys or a guitar synth tune over echoing, dirgey drums, rising to an apprehensive swirl fueled by misty cymbal crashes. Bleed begins as a trance-inducing piano piece and takes on a Philip Glass-inspired creepiness, while Mire reminds of Thalia Zedek and her band  Come, dirgy bludgeoning riffage lightened unexpectedly by what sounds like the woodwinds sestting on a mellotron.

“Burst into flames, pieces on the ground,” Wright murmurs as Captive to Nowhere begins, skeletally, then exploding in a blaze of distorted guitars. The best song on the album, Surely, They’ll Tear It Down brings back the Randi Russo edge, this time as a slow, towering art-rock anthem, stately organ juxtaposed against a smoldering guitar melody: “Such waste, such decay,” Wright snarls. It could be sarcastic: an anti-gentrification broadside? The album winds up with  a dark harmonium theme playfully titled Mason & Hamlin (do they make harmoniums as well as pianos?). Wright is at the Mercury Lounge on June 7.

Video Dump Day #2 5/2/13

Damn, the May concert calendar is a whopper. Putting that thing together has become a weeklong project – so much good stuff coming up it’s almost suffocating. Of course, one of the most major and historic and intense events of the year – Wadada Leo Smith‘s three-night stand at Roulette – had to coincide with this project. In the meantime…time to empty the tank with all the freebies and singles and videos that have been kicking around the corners here like dust bunnies.

Here’s the Rotaries’ Before Leaving – a gorgeous, anthemic, singalong janglepop gem to kick off your summer. The vocals could be stronger but the band is kicking. Does anybody hear White Hassle in the distance?

Shannon Wright’s The Caustic Light is a pitchblende hypnotic minimalist Randi Russo style dirge from her forthconing album In Film Sound due out May 7.

Portland, Oregon’s Alelia Diane’s The Way We Fall sounds like Cal Folger Day with a chamber pop band (or a mellotron) – intriguing stuff from her forthcoming album Come Out Swinging due in late June.

If you’ve got a minute, hang with Mike Vial’s Reaching Back til this hypnotic jazz-pop number gets creepy. It reminds a lot of Lee Feldman in darker moments. And the piece de resistance:

“In honor of Obama’s Second Term, Neil Nathan Inc. releases the Jumpstart Music Video off their acclaimed Power 2 The People Concept LP, Sweep the Nation [very favorably reviewed here back in January]. And like any 21st Century profit minded corporation in Earth’s Global Village, they outsourced production to the tiniest of Asian Tigers, the Philippines.

In it, the Obama Twins, Hope and Change, drag race each other in an all out battle to see who will Win the Future. But obstacles abound in the form of  Fearless President Putin, Iranian President Ahmadenijad & His Nuclear Bomb, Angela Merkel & the Euro-Mobile, as well as the Republican Elephant & their radical counterparts, the Tea Party. But do not fret, for help is on the way from Israeli President Netanyahu, Chinese Leader Xi Jinping & His Gang of Dragons, and ultimately America’s Man of Steel, Super Bill Clinton.

Neil says the tune was influenced by Cheap Trick, Guided by Voices, and Iggy Pop, and is giving it away for FREE.”

An Excellent New Album and a Bowery Ballroom Show by Hem

What do you make of the fact that excerpts from some of the songs on Hem’s new album Departure and Farewell first appeared in tv ads? On one hand, for an artist with any cred at all to debut new material in commercials usually amounts to career suicide – John Mellencamp could tell you something about that. On the other, it’s tempting to give Hem a pass. If there’s any band that deserves a little trickle-down money so they can afford the big-studio production that their lushly orchestrated, sweepingly melancholic songs require, Hem fits the bill. Yet from an artistic standpoint, would you want your audience to associate your music with, say, a credit card company whose ad they (or their lazy flatmates, or siblings, or parents) forgot to mute? As a listener, would you want to hear a song that reminds you of a  commercial? Obviously not. Those are just a couple of the dilemmas faced by artists these days. Robert Johnson had to go down to the crossroads to make his deal; 75 years later, Hem simply handed over the files and took the cash.

Whatever you think of that transaction, there’s no denying how beautiful the new album is. Seriously: do you know anyone who doesn’t like Hem? Sally Ellyson’s sad, poignant vocals and the band’s slow, Indian summer ballads have won them a rabid following that acts who play such quiet, often delicate music seldom achieve. They’re playing Bowery Ballroom on May 4 at 9; general admission tix are $20 and still available as of this writing.

The theme of the album is endings, no great suprise considering the band’s previous output, a topic to which they’re especially well suited. Several of these tracks are available as free downloads (and for more delicious live stuff, check out the Hem channel at archive.org including their show earlier this month at the Bell House).

The opening, title cut sets Dan Messe’s terse piano against stately harp and bassoon, building to one of the band’s signature swells. The first of the free downloads, Walking Past The Graveyard, Not Breathing is an ominously blithe oldtimey waltz at its roots. “They are there inside, though we can’t see them,” Ellyson intones nonchalantly. Things Are Not Perfect in Our Yard is short and hypnotic, playing off a catchy, fingerpicked Steve Curtis riff.

The Seed has an oldtime country gospel feel lit up by Heather Zimmerman’s rustic violin. Bob Hoffnar’s blue-sky pedal steel washes through The Jack Pine. “My blood runs into the Gowanus Canal where it sinks to the bottom , it hurts like hell,” Ellyson laments in Tourniquet (another free download), a tale of Civil War era Brooklyn.

Seven Angels spices an oldtimey waltz with gospel piano and lively, twangy Gary Maurer guitar. Gently Down the Stream builds a pretty majestic rolling-on-a-river sweep, while Bird Song (an original, not a Dead cover) works a gentle 60s folk-pop vein.

Traveler’s Song – still available on a No Depression free sampler (via Limewire) – is over in less than two minutes, a rewrite of an old Irish ballad. The Tides at the Narrows builds to an unexpected majesty out of a spiky bluegrass-tinged tune on the wings of Maurer’s dobro. Last Call, with its sly Buffalo Springfield reference and a dreamy Ellyson vocal, is the album’s longest song; it winds up with the surprisingly upbeat, somewhat honkytonk-flavored So Long. Call this chamber pop, art-rock or even country music – it’s all three and it’s uniquely and instantly recognizable as Hem. May they thrive long past the point of needing corporate cash to pay for studio time.

Luxotone Releases Robin O’Brien’s Darkest Shining Moment

The morbid imagery of the cd package  – a surreal vintage 60s psychedelic illustration by Velveeta Heartbreak - for Robin O’Brien‘s new album Dive Into the End of the World pretty much gives it away. A chillingly understated song cycle fixated on death and dissolution, it’s O’Brien’s first collection of all-new material in years and one of the most shattering albums in recent memory. Beautiful as O’Brien’s voice is, and as many of the songs are, it’s not for the faint of heart. With a nod to Dylan, O’Brien asks her “blue-eyed son” what he sees:

I saw bright coin in the business of cancer
She opened my palm, put a portal in my chest
But earth from her back shakes off the rider
Mother, she knows best

The personal as universal; ontogeny recapitulating philogeny – or vice versa. That’s a line from the album’s third track, a tense, brooding folk-rock song titled Ashes, and it’s typical of what this album has in store.

“Joy is a narrow place, but your face is always changing,” O’Brien reminds over a Ticket to Ride bounce on the hypnotic opening track: summer is something that you “take with you when you go.”  George Reisch’s uneasy, echoing layers of guitars echo the anxious swirl of 80s paisley underground bands like the Rain Parade. Guitarist Kevin Salem opens the next track, Sylph with a snarling, bluesy slide guitar riff, O’Brien’s vocals raging through a bullhorn effect:

This house that I call my home
Slide into the muddy water
By the river’s edge it crumbled
Over stones and broken bottles

Salem takes it out with a long, savage solo, like Richard Thompson at his most assaultive. “Drink the sugar from the leaf, you can taste the passage over,” O’Brien adds knowingly.

She’s been a cult artist for years, sought out for her full-throated, soul-infused, soaring multi-octave vocals. This is her third album on the insurgent Chicago label Luxotone. Her previous two explored everything from folk noir to blue-eyed soul and jazz-inflected, Joni Mitchell-esque stylings. The latter comes front and center on Frozen Still, O’Brien taking flight over Nikos Eliot Flaherty-Laub’s icily surreal avant garde piano, Reisch holding the song to the cold ground with a terse bass pulse. It contrasts with the shamanic dirge I Will Not Fight and its doomed “we cannot drink the water” mantra, Salem’s distantly menacing slide guitar over Marcus Giamatti’s coldly minimalistic bass.

With its jangly, watery chorus-box guitar, soaring chorus harmonies and 80s folk-pop feel, Catalina is arguably the most gorgeous song here. Dive into the Purple Water is essentially the title track, its layers of guitars and O’Brien’s catalog of doomed images building menace over a minimalistic delta blues beat.

O’Brien takes the catchy, swinging 60s folk-pop song Empty into desolate terrain, Reisch’s spaciously funereal guitar accents enhancing its wounded, exhausted feel. St. John blends lush early 90s dreampop with gothic folk, Reisch’s off-center guitar tones transforming it into a surreal lunar lullaby as O’Brien contemplates herself “all ondone amidst the lilies.” On Mountain, Reisch builds wailing, galloping Floydian desert rock behind O’Brien’s tense, accusatory vocals. We Catch Fire works a gloomy Velvets-folk vibe; the album winds up majestically and hauntingly with Under the Skin, a southwestern gothic bolero evocative of  Penelope Houston, fueled by Risch’s simmering, spacious reverb tones:

Night is made of sand
Ours are the children
Born to watch them die
All of our riches
In the cauldron fire

Jocelyne Lanois of Martha & the Muffins and Crash Vegas, Chris Harford and Anthony Presti also make cameos. It’s the high point of O’Brien’s career and a genuine classic that ranks with the darkest material that Nick Cave, PJ Harvey or Nina Nastasia ever recorded.

GBV Work Toward the Record for Most Singles From an Album

Could be true by the time these folks finish. The latest limited-edition Guided by Voices vinyl single from the forthcoming English Little League (their fourth album in a year, no joke) is the best one. Xeno Pariah has a Pollard title but Tobin Sprout roar and catchiness, vintage Britrock that draws on the Kinks, glam, Britfolk and everything good coming out of the UK prior to 1975. Little Jimmy the Giant, the b-side,  is a catchy, bouncy lo-fi powerpop romp that shifts the focus a couple of years forward into the pub rock era . Collect ‘em all, they’ll be worth something someday!

And as nice as it’s been to have all these singles to fill the front page here on days where there’s a lot going on in that you can’t see, it’s tempting to say, enough already, before the jokes start and people start to refer to this thing as a Guided by Voices fan blog…

Wire’s New Album: Change Becomes Them

If Wire’s new album Change Becomes Us sounds like the great lost follow-up to Chairs Missing, that’s because it sort of is. Many of its tracks are finished versions of sketches of songs from the band’s late 70s period, dating from their brilliant initial trio of albums: Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. Much as these songs share a scruffy surrealism, bracingly dark tunefulness and Wire’s signature wry humor, the original postpunk band is not trying to recapture the past: they keep evolving, and the songs are in the here and now. Ironically, in an age where anybody can record an album with their phone, the kings of late 70s DIY have expanded their sonic palette further here than ever, giving the songs an often hypnotic lushness that sometimes evokes Australian art-rockers the Church.

Doubles & Trebles, a menacing spy story, immediately sets the tone, building from an eerie whole-tone guitar riff to a stalker insistence. With its offkilter vocal harmonies and watery dreampop clang, Keep Exhaling is primo vintage Wire with early 90s production values – and is that an I Am the Walrus quote? Likewise, Adore Your Island snidely references the Who’s Baba O’Reilly.

Re-Invent Your Second Wheel works a tricky tempo with more than a hint of theatrical Peter Gabriel-era Genesis amthemics. Stealth of a Stork builds layer upon layer over a straight-ahead punk stomp, while B W Silence works a suspenseful, watery dreampop vibe. Trippy flanged vocals and enveloping sonics give Time Lock Fog a feel like the Church circa 1993 or so. Magic Bullet, with its unexpected hints of reggae, would have been a standout track on Chairs Missing. Eels Sang reminds of early Gang of Four but with wetter guitars, while Love Bends is a more organic take on the dancefloor rock Wire was doing in the mid-80s: think Ultravox with heavy drums.

The album gets stronger as it goes along. As We Go has a catchy Outdoor Miner hookiness, but more ominously…until a droll singalong chorus that they run over and over again. & Much Besides segues out of it, a lush, balmy futuristic scenario that sounds suspiciously saracastic. The album winds up with Attractive Space, which grows from a Zarathustra-ish riff into a big spacerock anthem. In the time between when many of these songs were conceived and finally realized, Colin Newman and Graham Lewis’s voices have mellowed, Robert Grey’s beats have taken on an unexpected subtlety, with the band’s most recent member Matthew Simms adding textural lushness and diversity. Not a substandard track on the album, pretty impressive for a band that’s been around, more or less, since 1976. Also available: the latest in Wire’s series of “legal bootlegs,” a grab bag of live material culled from a 2000 Nottingham Social gig as well as radio sessions at WFMU and KEXP in 2011. Wire are at Bowery Ballroom in June and likely to sell out the venue; watch this space for onsale dates for tix.