238: CHAIRS MISSING | WIRE
Jeffrey Terich (below) believes it to be a better record than their debut Pink Flag. I agree, but I believe only by a hair. That is why they are really close on the list. Though some of you might wonder why so high on the list, I believe these two perfect post-punk records are in their right place. The more I listen to Chairs, the more I like it. It just might be a masterpiece.
JEFFREY TERICH at Stereogum: To listen to Pink Flag and Chairs Missing back to back, it seems remarkable that these albums were even made by the same band. Chairs Missing still has the unmistakable voice of Colin Newman, and the same arty, expressionist approach to songwriting that adamantly avoided conventional pop structures (though there are a few more recognizable choruses here). But instrumentally and atmospherically, this is a big step into an entirely new territory.
On Chairs Missing, Wire push themselves a lot farther into the avant garde than they had before. Certainly, Pink Flag is about as strange as a punk album can get without stepping out of the punk aesthetic, but Chairs Missing is an art-rock album played two minutes at a time, at 160 BPMs. A few of the tracks sound like the Wire of old: the stomping “From the Nursery,” the bright and jittery “Sand In My Joints,” and the hard-rocking closing number, “Too Late.” But the real beauty of Chairs Missing is hearing what happens when Wire dials up the weirdness, and that weirdness is really something to behold.
Opening track “Practice Makes Perfect” is just as dark and menacing as Pink Flag’s “Reuters,” but vastly scarier. It escalates a spiral staircase of a bassline up toward some shards of horror-soundtrack guitar, as Newman delivers an increasingly creepy narrative that reaches its chilling climax when he says, “Up in my bedroom/ I’ve got Sarah Bernhardt’s hand.” The band incorporates some dizzyingly uptempo synth leads on “Another the Letter,” builds up a tempestuous head of steam on the intense, six-minute “Mercy,” and showcases their more ambient, dirge-heavy side on the hushed and melancholy “Marooned” and the itchy, psychedelic “Used To.”
And yet again, Chairs Missing — much like 154 — balances out some of the band’s weirder textural experiments with a pair of tracks that showcase their melodic prowess. And they’re both about bugs. The title of “Outdoor Miner” refers to the serpentine miner — a type of inchworm — and its sing-songy chorus of “He lies on his side/ Is he trying to hide?/ In fact it’s the earth that he’s known since birth” puts a weirdly affectionate spotlight on a creature that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s also, I should note, one of the prettiest songs in the band’s repertoire. By contrast, “I Am The Fly” is a clap-along post-punk single that’s more in the punk spirit than anything else here, Newman repeating the phrase “I am the fly in the ointment” as the song carries out on an abrasive, albeit unshakable groove. . .