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1. Please Take
2. Now Was
3. Adapt
4. Two Minutes
5. Clay
6. Bad Worn Thing
7. Moreover
8. A Flat Tent
9. Smash
10. Down To This
11. Red Barked Trees

• Download Two Minutes (MP3, 7.1 MB)
• Download cover art (JPG, 1.5 MB)

[Red Barked Tree] is 40 minutes of gorgeous nothings, full of intricate curlicues of sparkling Colin Newman guitar and synth given beef by the surging rhythms of Robert Grey aka Gotobed and Graham Lewis. They play alternative guitar music better than any young British band you can name.

Garry Mulholland, BBC Music

From the opener Please Take to the closing title track, this is a record that will never embarrass you and will also give clues as to how discerning your friends are. Get rid if they don’t like it.

Pete Clark, Evening Standard

This record contains some of the band's softest, most ingeniously beautiful performances, as well as some of its fiercest… It's also a fact that Red Barked Tree compares favourably with the very best of the definitive Wire.

Keith Cameron, Mojo

Red Barked Tree is a proud and unapologetic album; as it shifts between sounds there's conviction in every noise and word. It's the sound of a band still having a lot of fun. And there's not an ounce of nostalgia.

Helen Clarke, musicOMH

Red Barked Tree shows the band's vigor, melodic prowess, and capacity to surprise remain undiminished. 34 years into their career, Wire are still eager to redefine their essence.

Stuart Berman, Pitchfork

Selecting a standout track is no easy feat when there’s so much to sink one’s teeth into. Over 11 tracks of fantastically unapproachable guitars and vocals, of deceivingly simple rhythms and unswerving purpose, Wire sound perfectly comfortable in their own skin and sense of history on Red Barked Tree.

Crispin Kott, PopMatters

Red barked Tree is wonderful. Grey’s drumming remains the band’s heartbeat, and his simple panache underpins 11 inventive tracks.

Ian Shirley, Record Collector

Red Barked Tree can stake a good claim to being the first great album of 2011. The members of Wire may be in their mid-fifties, but this is no attempt to relieve former glories. Instead, itʼs the sound of a band who still sound energized, who are still trying to push the boundaries of what they can do with their music and are still writing terrific songs. Highly recommended.

David Clare, The 405

Wire's music has always had a strong emotional core, one described by the palpable absence of sentimentality; on Red Barked Tree, that negative space—a reflection of pop's false warmth, and perhaps of humanity's greater estrangement from itself—is frozen even harder than usual.

Jason Heller, The A.V. Club

Their lyrics are still dark and funny, and they show a real talent for varying intensities. The herky-jerky sound that is Wire's trademark is there on songs like Now Was and A Flat Tent, but they gear up to face-smashing aggression on Two Minutes, then get almost ethereal on Adapt. This ability to switch gears without sounding awkward or forced is what makes Red Barked Tree so impressive, and is something that few younger bands could pull off.

Chris Dart, The Eye Weekly

Theirs are succinct and eloquent songs; in a long career Wire continue to deal in short, sharp shocks.

The Guardian

On this showing, the feral rage of [Wire's] punk youth has matured into a pleasingly poised disaffection, with no loss of acuity.

Andy Gill, The Independent

The acerbic declaration on Two Minutes that 'coffee is not a replacement for food or happiness' suggests [Wire have] remembered what they do best: look askance at the modern world while making a clever racket.

Gareth Grundy, The Observer

Red Barked Tree is an exhilarating album, not least because it is so full of ideas.

Will Hodgkinson, The Times

With this strangely juvenile rush of an album, Wire have simultaneously honored and eroded the legacy of Pink Flag. Its nonsense lyrics seem intent on sapping the meaning from everything they've ever recorded, while its variegated, scintillating instrumentation pulls their three-decades-old sound into new domains. Gleeful act of sabotage or pop folly, Red Barked Tree is a worthy addition to the Wire legend.

Tiny Mix Tapes

The best Wire records have the air of a code that’s so attractively stated, it demands cracking, and Red Barked Tree is assuredly in that number.

John Robinson, Uncut

Red Barked Tree captures the sharp and fiery hallmark defined by Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Grey some thirty-odd years ago to strike a pressure point relevant to younger generations. Faithful to the band’s founding glory, Red Back Tree is incendiary.

Urb.com

At a time when back catalogue outsells fresh creativity and newcomers achieve fame by adding a lick of paint to their parents' record collections, it's unusual to find a band who, despite plying their trade for decades, are willing and able to make new work that's as vital and relevant as their own illustrious past recordings. Wire are such a band, and with Red Barked Tree they just might have succeeded in making a statement that will sound as strong in 30 years as their celebrated historical oeuvre does today.

Red Barked Tree rekindles a lyricism sometimes absent from Wire's previous work and reconnects with the live energy of performance, harnessed and channelled from extensive touring over the past few years.

Red Barked Tree was conceived, written and recorded mostly during 2010 by the pared-down line-up of Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Grey, with no guests. Ranging from the hymnal Adapt to the barking sledgehammer art-punk of Two Minutes, the album encompasses the full palette of style and nuance that has always endeared Wire to pastel-tinged pop aficionados and bleeding-edge avant-rockers alike.

Whatever Wire make is Wire music: this is the band's enigmatic guiding axiom. While Wire remain agnostic about the nature and identity of their aesthetic essence, it's always been instantly recognisable, manifesting itself throughout their heterogeneous work. Perhaps this enigma will be revealed when we find the "Red Barked Trees"...

Red Barked Tree, track by track, in the band's own words; derived from conversations with Wilson Neate

Please Take

Graham Lewis (GL): "Please take your knife out of my back and, when you do, please don't twist it": this lay in my notebook for six years awaiting the right melody. Sarcastic stoic records Pyrrhic victory, employing seductive melody in lethal "fuck-off" song. Let's pass it on for universal usage.

Colin Newman (CN): There's a fantastic, expansive elegance between the three basic elements: the drums, bass and rhythm guitar. If it's not the best Graham song on a Wire album, it's certainly one of the best. I hope it's not about me!

Robert Grey (RG): I was asked to propose a track sequence for the album, and I found it difficult initially. Then I realised that if I thought of the tracks as a series of scenes in a play or a film, it made it easier. I like the idea of the tracks telling a story: the story was the album from beginning to end. "Please Take" was my choice for the opening track—it has an introductory feel, a sense of trouble brewing maybe...

Now Was

CN: Rhythmically, it's a bit like "Brazil." It came fully formed. Like most of the songs, it was very fast to write; it only took a few minutes. The arrangement is a classic example of what happens if you take something that's just acoustic guitar and vocals and throw it in front of Wire: they don't do what you expect, and they do it effortlessly.

GL: It's about those aristocrats of arrogance, horrible cynical middle-aged men...

RG: I interpreted it as referring to one very specific person...but that particular person could also be part of the general group Graham mentions. It was originally called "Wizard of Was," which I rather liked.

Adapt

GL: One of the first texts written for the album. It's a kind of where-are-we, state-of-the- world address: observations about extreme climate change and disaster, the failure of financial markets ("fairness flounders, sincere cheats"), child labour, hollow politics. Even Chekhov gets a name check.

CN: I knew it was a hymn as soon as I'd written it. When I presented the song, I said, "This is a Christmas hit!" I can just hear the St. Agnes Girls' School Choir singing it as a Christmas single! Originally, there was some swearing in it, but I asked Graham to take it out: you can't have swearing in a song like this. There's something absurd about the song, but it's completely beautiful.

RG: After we'd recorded "Adapt," I forgot about it, and when Colin sent it to me as one of the mixes I thought, "This is so good." It's my favourite track. It moves you emotionally and physically. It has a pleasantly melancholic feel—not depressing, though.

Two Minutes

CN: This is the one track that pre-dates 2010. It's from 2001. I made the basic riff for Read and Burn 01 but never developed it. I brought it into the studio this year and, as soon as Rob and Graham started playing on it, it sounded absolutely awesome. Then it just needed some random shouting on it. "Fuck" isn't appropriate in "Adapt," but in "Two Minutes" it's fair game.

RG: I did think the words were very strange until Colin told me that he'd collected them from random texts. I'm not sure where he found these, but that would explain why it didn't seem to make immediate sense. It sounds like it makes sense to the person who's speaking it, but it's a very odd construction. Although it's odd lyrically, musically it's definitely recognisable as Wire—as one of our heavy numbers.

GL: It disrupts the album nicely, and it makes things a little more multifaceted. Contains "umbilical cord twang"!

Clay

GL: It is what it is. Ingredients include compressed "Fly" frequencies.

CN: It's really got very little in common with "I Am the Fly." There's a bit more of a tune to it. It's got that cheeky Wire sound. If you take away the bassline, it doesn't actually sound like "I Am the Fly." So you can blame Graham!

Bad Worn Thing

GL: It was originally called "The Overcrowded Nature of Things" but became "Bad Worn Thing." Written from observations made during a couple of bloody awful days spent travelling in England or, better put, trying to travel in England: a dreadful train journey that laid bare the inadequacies of the British transport system. Add to that the ambient noise generated by the early morning drum 'n' bass soundtrack for the fevered trade in sex and drugs in London's East End, UK, Inc.

Moreover

CN: The first time we played it in the studio, the engineer said, "You make a big fucking noise for three people!" I was trying to get across the idea of a mad preacher, with a moronic riff. It's Wire unleashed. Wire always manage to sound like Wire, even though there's no actual brief that says what Wire are supposed to sound like. That's a key element in how it all works.

GL: Or a moronic preacher with a mad riff?

RG: "Moreover" has intensity and simplicity, and the fact that the studio engineer said he liked it was a very good sign!

A Flat Tent

CN: It's quite Wire-like, without sounding like any particular Wire song. I love all the stops in it—they're ridiculous. Only Wire do songs with stops like that.

GL: Its working title was "Ten." A new title was necessary. There's a hold in the song on A␣, so I combined "A Flat" with the first title and manufactured "A Flat Tent."

Smash

GL: It's where roadkill meets potatoes, hence "Smash"—as in "For Mash Get Smash" from the old British TV commercial. You are what you eat? A few of the images also suggest something of a perverted Narnia...

RG: How would you like your potatoes with that roadkill? Roast, boiled or mashed?

CN: It's less of a chorus and more of a car crash. I love the way the chorus sounds like something went seriously wrong—like one of those '80s Japanese pop records where it suddenly goes into something you really didn't expect. I like that idea. It has an absurdity to it. For ages it was called "Spuds."

Down to This

CN: It's about everything being shit, on every level you can possibly think of—and the only thing you've got left is death. Graham thinks it's one of the best songs I've ever written. But I find it pretty depressing.

GL: It projects a creeping sense of doom: urban malfunction... What happens when ALL the lights go out?

RG: Well, it's not cheerful, is it? We all die at some point, and you can't be cheerful all the time. It contrasts nicely with "A Flat Tent." You have a diverse spectrum of emotions on the album. That's a good thing, involving the listeners' full breadth of emotion.

Red Barked Trees

GL: It's about dismay and hope, and the wonder of technology versus the ancient knowledge of alchemy. Will we destroy rare invaluable flora and fauna before we can research and exploit their unique properties? In the end, is it going to be the red-barked tree that's going to hold the cure for cancer? Or Google: cancercure@g-med.com?

CN: It's magnificent. It has the quality of a journey. Obviously, there's always more than one meaning, but I like to think of the search for the red-barked trees as a search for the philosopher's stone or maybe soma: maybe an artistic quest for the thing that will enable you to understand everything. The whole album is more lyrical than anything Wire have done for a while, this track especially. It's got an open-eyed beauty to it, looking at the world as a mysterious place. It's more like Pentangle than Wire! Wire have never made a track anything like it: it's in 3⁄4 time, with acoustic guitars, bouzouki and organ. It's an innovative track for Wire—perhaps the most different. There's nothing in our catalogue that sounds anything like it, and that pleases me immensely.

RG: We stole it all from Pentangle! It's certainly not a rock beat, but is it a folk-rock beat? It's more musical than the average Wire song. When Colin sent me the mix, I commented that it was post-moronic, because Colin always says Wire songs have a moronic element in them, and what's missing here is that essential moronic element. That made it stand out. It's my second-favourite track on the record. If "Down to This" was like a burial scene in my overall narrative of the album, then "Red Barked Trees" is a resurrection: it's uplifting and hopeful. It has a sort of healing theme to it. Hopefully, that'll stay with listeners—we don't want to leave them depressed at the end.

Red Barked Tree lyrics