These days it seems like if you want to listen to a current band outside the Top 40 spectrum, there's a one in four chance that any album you'll end up listening to is best described by terms such as revival,\ ""New Wave"" and ""post-punk."" Also, that album is probably created by a band that spends equal time refining its meticulously devil-may-care appearance as its music.
Black Wire, a trio of young, attractive males from Leeds, England, may not be an exception to this popular trend of late '70s/early '80s revivalism, but they manage to one-up the competition and set themselves apart from the pack by doing something truly unique: They actually sound like they learned New Wave from the bands that created the sound.
While most bands sporting fashionably retro looks and playing the music of 20-plus years ago sound like they've learned the tricks and intricacies of New Wave through second and third wavers like Blur, The Strokes or Franz Ferdinand, Black Wire sounds like it knows where this music came from. Black Wire plays its brand of revivalism with a devoted energy and irrepressible sense of fun that is often devoid from bands that play a genre of music with limited knowledge of its origins.
Their debut album, Black Wire, starts off with the highly danceable post-punk rave-up ""God of Traffic."" With its no nonsense, icily simplistic guitar playing and tense vocals, this is a song modern listeners will associate with a band like Franz Ferdinand, but a more apt comparison would be to early Orange Juice or Boys Don't Cry-era The Cure. This song exemplifies the sound of Black Wire: It is New Wave revivalism you've heard before, but rarely do you hear it with such attention to the details that made New Wave and post-punk so compelling when they took the stodgily tasteful musical world by storm.
Black Wire's dance rock oozes paranoia and tension, and their guitar work is less about milking an '80s-esque riff for all its worth and more about creating an aura of blissful confusion. The vocals seem to mirror this feeling. Lead singer Dan Wilson is joined by guitarist/drummer Si McCabe and bass player Tom Greatorex in vocal duties more often that not, and the high energy, sloppy singing that results is everything that rock music should be: catchy, youthful and full of attitude. Black Wire's singing is the sound of people unsure of exactly where they're going in life, but enjoying every minute of it.
Similarly, ""Hard to Love Easy to Lay"" brings something sorely missing from this rash of revivalism—fun. This song's lyrics bring to mind the knowing celebration of teenage-dom pioneered by The Modern Lovers, while its sound is reminiscent of The Specials' poppy, punk-ska exuberance.
Ultimately, this album proves Black Wire has a formidable knowledge of New Wave's past and is capable of playing that music with the sort of outsider, hedonistic abandon that made the early '80s music scene worth reviving in the first place. Black Wire is like their song ""Attack! Attack! Attack!"": frantic and neurotic on some level, but more concerned with things like handclaps, catchy choruses and making sure everyone is enjoying their adolescent confusion.
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