First impressions can be a strange thing, especially when personal first impressions are out of whack with actual chronology. Those with a deeper musical knowledge than I generally greeted the 1988 appearance of the Wire album A Bell is a Cup…Until It is Struck and its immediate predecessor, 1987’s The Ideal Copy, with a mixture of surprise and confusion, perhaps joined with the adhesive of derision. For them, the reunion of this founding father band of the post-punk movement sounded so far removed from beloved early works like Pink Flag and Chairs Missing–all rawness and jagged sonic challenges–that the newer music, tilted more towards New Order than Joy Division, was like a sort of betrayal pressed into vinyl. It was still odd, there was no doubt about that. But it was distinctly different, and, worse than that, it bore a resemblance to the bands that were starting to make unlikely progress on the commercial charts, like Echo and the Bunnymen and the Cure. Credibility and selling out were topics of discussion around indie bands well before the likes of Twitter and Facebook gave everyone a powerful digital megaphone.

For me, though, this is what Wire simply sounded like. I hadn’t knowingly heard a note of those earlier albums yet, and the college radio station library that provided bountiful education to me was lacking in the earlier Wire efforts. I knew that the band was considered important, but my only hope of sonically contextualizing that reputation was with the second wave records on the station shelves. When it came to the newer music, especially that on A Bell is a Cup, my simple, under-informed judgement was pretty straightforward: it sounded good to me.

In the (many) years since, I’ve brushed up on early Wire. As with most of the revered albums of that genre in that era, I love those Wire discs. I’m no expert (I bow to others when it comes to this particular band), but if given a head start I can expound somewhat knowledgable on why, say, Pink Flag should be in every self-respecting music fan’s collection. Even though I will concede the superiority of first wave Wire, I also haven’t abandoned the material off of A Bell is a Cup. Truth is, it still sounds good to me.

Listen or download –> Wire, “Come Back in Two Halves”

(Disclaimer: The above song is housed in all its glory on the much mentioned A Bell is a Cup…Until It is Struck, which appears to me to be wholly out of print, not even as a digital release, although I give up on hunting those options down fairly quickly. A fair number of tracks from that album did show up on a “best of” release that focused strictly on the late eighties, but I honestly don’t think this song is capable of being acquired in a way that will duly compensate the band. I’m more confident that you can’t stride down to your favorite local, independently-owned record store and secure a copy in a manner that provides renumeration to both the proprietor of said shop and the artist. Regardless, I will gladly and promptly remove the song from the interweb should I be asked to do so by some with due authority to make such a request.)