Pink Flag 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: Over the course of their stop-start career, WIRE has been responsible for some brilliant and awe-inspiring music, consistently delivering an atmospheric, sonically detailed sound that has variously touched on art-punk, post-punk, experimental and alternative rock. For many fans, though, it's the work that they created during the late 1970s that will always be the band's strongest musical statement. Not About To Die, the group's latest release, revisits this fertile period, offering up raw but surprisingly on-point studio demos recorded before and during the sessions for Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979). It's the sound of a band evolving and innovating, at a point when they were still to establish themselves as innovative underground heroes.

Review: This typically robust, stomping collection of growling post-punk gems charts Wire's first wave of productivity forming their reformation in 1999. It was initially released in 2003 as a compilation of tracks released in the preceding three years (including the two Read and Burn EPs and the Send album). This edition has been re-mastered, with the brutal edits of the original CD (a requirement thanks to the sheer length of the collated cuts) replaced with more subtle and less dramatic tweaks. It delivers pretty much everything you want from Wire - intensity, darkness, energy and heaviness - and is well worth your attention, especially as this particular CD edition has only been manufactured in limited quantities.

Review: The latest effort from British post punks Wire sets the record straight. And then re-emphasise the point. Having been the first word in the genre for five decades now (credited with its invention in 1976), 'Mind Hive' confirms that longevity hasn't killed creativity.

It certainly sounds like the band in question, but they are still looking for new reference points to further immerse us in their aural world. By that we're talking elements of dream pop, surrealist ambience, metal and psychedelia, resulting in an album that cuts through the noise and grabs you by the earlobes. Opening on the ferocious 'Be Like Them', only to close on the hugely atmospheric and, at times, meditative 'Humming', it's destined to satisfy long term followers while enlisting a new generation of fans.

Review: Wire are approaching their fortieth anniversary working as a band, and frankly no band has any right to still sound as kinetic, skilful and fresh with ideas in the wake of four decades of cultural shifts as they do on this snappy 15th album, collected from the same sessions that wrought last year's self-titled effort yet more experimental and expansive in nature As ever, their sound is spiky yet seductive, malevolent yet melodic, with its pop flourishes burnished by glacial abstraction. Colin Gilbert's vocals remain as mysterious yet playful as ever, whether backed up by textured ambience or motorik groove, resulting in a rare gem from a national treasure in rare form.