Only Wire would attempt to make their fourth album after their tenth. At the beginning of their career, between 1977 and 1979, the great British art punk quartet released three perfect albums, Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154, each wildly different from the other. Then they splintered, though a bunch of post-154 songs-in-process came to light later, in the dodgy live recordings that made up the bizarre, messy Document and Eyewitness (1981) and 1996's Turns and Strokes.
Since they first reunited in 1985, Wire has had an exceptionally weird relationship to its own past. During their commercial peak in the latter half of the 80s, they refused to play anything from the pre-breakup era, and for the first few years of their current incarnation, they mostly acted as if they'd jumped straight from Pink Flag to the year 2000. At the beginning of this decade, they started looking back in earnest-- not in a "hey, kids, we wrote "12 x U", remember?" way, but in a "cleaning up loose ends" way. 2011's Strays EP contained four pieces that had been kicking around their live repertoire for a long time but had never been recorded to their satisfaction before; the Black Session album that came out last year actually included a few relatively faithful versions of old songs.
And now they've gone back to the material they'd have recorded for the album that never happened after 154. The 13 titles on Change Becomes Us are new, but the songs themselves aren't; they're all more or less newly rewritten versions of the Document and Eyewitness/Turns and Strokes repertoire. It's not the first time they've reckoned with some of those sketches, either. "B/W Silence" and "Time Lock Fog" are respectively adapted from "Lorries" and "5/10," which singer/guitarist Colin Newman previously reworked on his 1982 solo album Not To. "Doubles & Trebles" is a new version of "Ally in Exile", which Wire mutated first into "Art of Persistence" on 2000's The Third Day and then into "I Don't Understand" on 2002's Read & Burn 01; positioned as the new album's opener, its arrangement and lyric (about a solitary agent in enemy territory) explicitly allude to the way "Reuters" introduces Pink Flag.
The Wire of 1980, and the band's members on the solo records that immediately followed the split, were radicals who were trying to pry open the pop-recording form and avoid repeating themselves. The Wire of 2013 have settled on a sweet-and-prickly sound that suits them, and sonically Change Becomes Us is of a piece with Red Barked Tree and Object 47, the other studio albums they've recorded since the 2004 departure of guitarist/texturalist Bruce Gilbert. (These days, his spot is filled by Matt Simms, who's 30 years younger than the rest of the band.)
Considered as a set of songs, though, it's fantastic-- a clear look at the twisty, glittering material that had previously only been a few sparkles of possibility shining through the muck of those difficult live albums. The band who wrote these songs were a couple of years away from becoming hardcore punk icons-- there are hints of that when drummer Robert Grey breaks into a high-speed two-step on "Adore Your Island" and "Stealth of a Stork". And they were so deeply invested in non-obviousness that their lyrics sometimes read like cryptic crossword clues: the hook of "Eels Sang Lino"-- recast here as "Eels Sang"-- is an anagram for "in Los Angeles."
But the Wire of 1979 and 1980 were also developing their enduring fascination with unlikely kinds of beauty, and their 21st century incarnation has built some of their most fetching songs from some of the most ragged and jagged ideas to come from their younger selves. ("Re-Invent Your Second Wheel", sung by bassist Graham Lewis, is a languorous waltz whose DNA has traces of the in-your-face Document and Eyewitness experiment "Zegk Hoqp".) History and transformation are, understandably, recurring themes in the new lyrics on Change Becomes Us, and it's a treat to have this missing link in the Wire story repaired, even if it's as much an anomaly in the present moment as Document and Eyewitness was in its time.
