even if you’ve never heard of them, wire is a band that changed the landscape of punk forever. formed in london in 1976, wire is mostly known for their influential debut album pink flag. in part because of pink flag, punk rock went from rockin’ three-chord simplicity to something more challenging, provocative, and experimental while carrying the defiant punk rock ethos. this would loosely be defined as ‘post-punk’-artsy punk rock, in simple terms. if you’re familiar with post-punk revival (franz ferdinand, the strokes, interpol), it’s supposed to be a continuation of the post-punk wire helped develop, but it’s wildly different from it. in general, post-punk is weird, sometimes atonal, and pretty hard to listen to.
“Pink Flag” is the title track in… you guessed it, pink flag. it’s a short track at just about three-and-a-half minutes long, and the guitar literally only plays the e major chord throughout the entire track. but for its simplicity, this song manages to do a lot, especially in regards to how it handles tension and release. you have this rolling, rumbling drum crescendo that leads into the guitar, riff, and vocals, and there’s something weirdly elegant with how colin newman’s vocals march above the instrumentation. he starts by narrating what appears to be the events of a battle, and his defiant tone makes it feel like he’s directly questioning the audience as he asks, (“How many dead or alive?”) as the song then dissolves into rapid, frenetic chaos and yelling.
it still blows my mind with how wire is able to show so much frustration and anger with dynamics and percussion alone. the guitar and bass are almost stupidly simple and repetitive, with little melody, while the tempo changes and vocal shifts (from singing to yelling) carry the song forward. when i think of tempo changes moving the song through different stages, i think of “All Souls Day” by unwound, which has similar rhythmic shifts for each stage of the song. clearly, wire has carried an influence on everything from hardcore to new wave.
q-street 