Wire, "I Should Have Known Better" (1979)

(listen)

This comes from Wire's third album, 154, my favorite album by one of my favorite New Wave bands—or, "post-punk," I guess maybe is the term of art they prefer. But note date and see cover. Latter days, with all the writing about songs, I sometimes lose track of how fabulously dedicated I have been, and can be still, to the art and science of the Rock Album ... man. So that's where I'm coming from when I say, really, you need to hear all of 154, the whole thing, every bit of it. Anyway, you can hear the first thing with this, as it is the intense big kickoff side 1 album opener tune. It starts on its furry, throbbing beat and quickly opens up into more throbbing, on suddenly infinitely opening levels, until finally the frog-throated B.C. Gilbert enters with the sing-songy chant. Then you're about in, not even 30 seconds, and the whole song keeps going on that way, an aural equivalent of a fast ride in an up elevator, ultimately capable, in one very nice moment, of sustaining an electric guitar chord. It never adds up that much about the regret implied in the title ("I've redefined the meaning of vendetta"?), but that's never been an issue. I am more interested in the way it makes one more bridge between a Martin Hannett kind of thing going on then in Manchester, whereas Wire operated out of London (and had 154 gigs to their credit at the time they recorded this), and the kind of mad swirling trip hop that came much later, which I guess has its own debts as well to the Manchester thing. Refracted in certain ways, this—the whole album, I'm saying—could be a distant cousin of that, wholly original in its own right, and really getting down to their business and doing it right about here.