Since the pandemic cancelled the second half of their 2020 US tour, Wire seem to have been on hiatus with band attention focussed solely on the long in production documentary.
New music has therefore come via the band members’ individual projects. Colin Newman has produced two album’s worth of Immersion recordings and Memorials featuring guitarist Matthew Sims (and Verity Susman) have already released three albums. Bassist Edvard Graham Lewis is about to join the fray with his latest solo album ‘Alreet?’.
Away from Wire, Lewis has been prolific in multiple guises so it’s something a surprise that ‘Alreet?’ is an album of Wire-ish electronic pop, although less so if you consider that the record features contributions from Sims and drummer Robert Grey as well as sampled guitar (and a co-write) from founder member Bruce Gilbert.
For anyone not up to speed with Lewis’s solo work, Wire Mark 2 is probably the best reference point for the amalgam of dense percussion, synths and guitars on ‘Alreet?’. Some songs match the lushness of some of the Wir material whilst at times ‘Alreet?’ shares a similar edge to ‘The Ideal Copy’.
Lewis’s distinctive baritone, underused in the current incarnation of Wire, is deployed to good effect here to suit the mood of the songs, by turns menacing or soothing.
Current single ‘Switch’ is the album’s most accessible moment whilst ‘I Still Remember’ is another track with obvious hooks although curiously the crunching repetitive guitars are reminiscent of nothing other than Newman’s Githead project.
In contrast, the mood elsewhere is ominous such as on the insistent momentum of ‘Last Scene’ or the gothic drama of ‘Bang!’ – “no drugs of control” indeed!
Lyrically opener ‘Kinds of Whether’ might be musing on the impact of the pandemic – “You will not pass this way again/ in search of sonic treasure” and that mood of uncertainty is carried forward to the final song ‘Who The Hell’ which concludes with Lewis posing the question “Without humanity/who the fuck are we?”. There are no easy answers to be found here.
As you will have gathered, Wire references are difficult to avoid when considering ‘Alreet?’, even if Wire fans will certainly find plenty to love.
But ‘Alreet?’ deserves to be considered in its own right rather than as some sort of Wire-adjacent work because its mix of inventive electronic rock and idiosyncratic melodies will reward repeated plays.
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