The Ideal Copy

The Ideal Copy (1987) is Wire’s reformation record — the band had dissolved in 1980 and reassembled seven years later making something markedly different from Pink Flag and Chairs Missing. More electronic, more dub-influenced, colder and more interested in space than their earlier work. The dissolution of verse-chorus structure that Wire had been pursuing on their first three albums is here taken further, toward something that functions as much as texture as song.

The specific quality of The Ideal Copy — industrial but not aggressive, minimal but not ambient, rhythm-driven but not dance music — points forward to the Birmingham and Sandwell District sounds that developed in the early ’90s. Wire got there by a different route but ended up adjacent to the same aesthetic territory.