Opinions diverge wildly amongst both critics and fans as to which is Wire’s greatest album. Perhaps such a diffusion of views is inevitable when assessing a band who made a point of mutating and developing on their sound with each successive release. Most American journos tend to plump for “Pink Flag”, which is understandable — it’s breathtaking combination of velocity, melody and, most crucially of all, brevity, influenced a whole slew of British and American post-punk bands from the Homosexuals to the Minutemen. However, since Seth Man has already done an excellent job of reviewing that one, I’ll direct you straight to the Book of Seth for further reference rather than attempting to summarise it’s charms in one short paragraph. 

Nonetheless, although each of their three Harvest albums, and some — though not all — of their post-reformation ones have much to recommend them, I’m going to throw in my vote with “Chairs Missing” as being their finest hour. If anything, this is Wire’s transitional album, the stepping stone between the arty punk scratchings of “Pink Flag” and the gloomy grandeur of “154”, and it finds them in a fascinating state of flux which, although it produces extremely diverse results, somehow manages to hang together as a cohesive album without ever sounding schizoid or disjointed.

It begins with “Practise Makes Perfect”, featuring a reggaefied two-chord staccato riff topped off by cryptic, paranoid lyrics, and an oddly foreboding one-note synthesizer flourish which evokes the atmosphere of
an extraordanarily vivid dream gradually mutating into a nightmare. The song’s overall mood of fearful claustrophobia is re-inforced by a mocking gaggle of demonic laughter in the background which brings the song to a suitably sinister end.

It’s followed by “French Film Blurred”, in which a strikingly melodic Byrds-like chorus nestles alongside angular chord changes and lyrics which evoke a dreamlike combination of the celestial and the mundane. In fact, the entire album (and in particular the lyrics) suggests a fascination with the subconscious mind and the music it might produce if left to its own devices, unintellectualised and unimpeded by the strictures of rational thinking. On “Another The Letter”, Wire singlehandedly invent electroclash with a perversely chirpy dance beat topped off by lyrics describing the content of a letter which, with a macabre twist, turns out to be a suicide note. Meanwhile, “Men 2nd” is another effective combination of downbeat lyrics and an incongruously jaunty rhythmic and melodic structure.

“Marooned” is a mellow vignette about being lost at sea, establishing a mood of ghostly calm which is then immediately shattered by “Sand In My Joints”. The most obvious hangover from the “Pink Flag” era on the album apart from the closing “Too Late”, it develops the combination of aggression and bittersweet melody into something striking and feverishly intense. A more cynical, opportunistic outfit than Wire might have capitalised on the direction of the previous album by releasing an entire LP in this vein, but fortunately, they were far too restless as souls to settle for such a convenient lapse into formula.

“Being Sucked In Again” is the most upfront example of what critic Simon Reynolds called the “strange clockwork geometry” which was shamelessly plagiarised to far lesser effect by Elastica and Menswear in the mid-90s. “Heartbeat” (memorably covered, and completely re-invented, as a screaming industrial punk anthem by Big Black) is, in its original form, the album’s most soothing and soporific moment.

“Mercy” opens what would have been side 2 back in the vinyl era, and ups the ante on “Being Sucked In Again” by stretching itself out over five and a half breathtakingly cathartic minutes. Indeed, the song’s aggressively minimalistic chord sequence is stretched so damn taut it feels as though the song’s brittle structure could collapse into chaos at any moment, which it finally does after about four minutes and thirty seconds.

“Outdoor Miner” is the album’s obvious single, featuring an indelible Beatlesque chorus that shows just how big these guys might have been if they’d had a more conventional career plan (or perhaps a less indulgent record label). “I Am The Fly”, “I Feel Mysterious Today” and “From The Nursery” are all all childlike miniatures which update the combination of whimsy and an unsettling background aura of dementia pioneered by Syd Barrett for the post-punk era.

Then there’s a return to blissed-out psychedelic pop for “Used To”, which sets the scene for the most climactic of all climactic moments on an album which has an almost embarrassing surfeit of them. If I was forced at gunpoint to pick one overall favourite, I reckon “Too Late ” would get my vote as the finest song ever to emerge from the British post-punk era. Just about every ingredient which made the years 1978–81 so vital in the history of Brit underground music is contained here — clanging, fuzzed-out guitars, rigid drumbeats which manage to be both metronomically accurate and poundingly aggressive at the same time, a melody with enough hooks to rival the Buzzcocks or even the Undertones, droning, atonal keyboard patterns and a screaming finale that leaves the listener as exhausted, ravished and dirtied as one should feel after having great sex. The mix is so deliberately erratic during the song’s final minute that it sounds as though the members of Wire are literally battling in the studio to drown each other out and attain prominence (an idea probably borrowed from the Velvets’ “Sister Ray”). 

Along with several other UK albums of this era (Swell Maps’ “Jane From Occupied Europe”, The Raincoats’ debut, and even The Soft Boys’ “Underwater Moonlight”) “Chairs Missing” is a rich and eclectic masterpiece which proves beyond all doubt that the expansiveness and desire for musical progression which characterised the late 60s and early 70s were NOT incompatible with punk’s 45rpm adrenaline rush. On top of that, it still sounds marvellously contemporary even today. So if your post-punk collection is missing some chairs, get yer ass down to yer local CD dealer and rectify the situation tout suite.