Thirty-five years into their start-and-stop career, Wire are not short on live albums. This is the 15th they've released since 2004 through their own Pinkflag imprint, covering all three incarnations of the band: the brittle, brainy punks who hurtled artward from 1976 to 1980, the poppy, brainy "beat-combo" that branched out toward both alternative radio tunes and monomaniacal hammer-drone from 1985 to 1992, and the tough, brainy old guys who reconvened in 2000 and have been bearing down hard ever since. But the only really significant live Wire discs are the out-of-print Document and Eyewitness-- a bootleg-quality set centered on an abrasive 1980 gig that featured almost entirely new material-- and 1989's It's Beginning to and Back Again, which was so heavily reworked in the studio that it's barely a live album at all.
That shortlist hasn't changed with the new addition to the pile. The formal distinction of The Black Session is that it's the first recording to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup. (For those who haven't been following closely, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert left in the mid-2000s; Margaret Fielder McGinnis of Laika replaced him on tour for a few years, and, since 2010, Matt Simms has augmented the remaining trio of original members on tour.)
The days when Wire would turn up for gigs with a set of material the audience had never heard before, or save the throwbacks for the encore, are behind them. At this gig, they run through the better part of 2011's Red Barked Tree, basically ignore everything else from the past 24 years except for 2002's hardcore-velocity "Comet", and toss in a couple of old favorites. It's particularly unsettling to hear "Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW", one of their most precisely constructed studio singles, in a sloppy garage-band rendition-- metronomic drummer Robert Grey struggles to keep the tempo steady, and singer/guitarist Colin Newman sounds uncomfortably exposed when nobody joins him for harmonies on the chorus. The final encore is one that rejoined their repertoire in 2000 and stayed there: "Pink Flag", with its original two-chord structure replaced by a single blaring E chord at which they hammer for seven minutes or so until it disintegrates into end-of-show chaos.
For Wirephiles, the value of The Black Session is the live treatments of the Red Barked Tree tracks. As elegantly textured as that album was, it also sounded reserved and unconvinced in places, and tried to pass off some old Wire ideas as new ones. These versions have more fire and bite to them, even on slow numbers like "Down to This" and "Adapt", and the band has rearranged "Clay" to not sound quite so much like a faint carbon copy of 1978's "I Am the Fly". There's no getting over the resemblance of "Moreover" to Wire's 1979 single "A Question of Degree", but it's mostly an excuse for them to stomp hard, and for Simms and Newman to contrast a tightly wound little riff with a high-pressure spray of noise.
In the context of Wire's catalog, this is just another document of incremental change, and not even the best live recording they've made lately (that would be their gorgeous Daytrotter session from 2008). Still, if this were the only Wire record in existence-- a debut album by a new quartet, three of them in their late 50s, captured live on French radio-- it'd be bracingly new even in 2012, an original take on punk minimalism, guitar sound, singing technique, tunefulness vs. dissonance, and so on. "My God! They're so gifted!" Newman yells in "Two People in a Room", and as usual he could be referring to himself and his collaborators.
