Such An Unwelcome Event

Wire “Doubles and Trebles”

If this sounds to you like “classic Wire,” it’s because it basically is – this is a new version of “Ally In Exile,” a song from around 1980 that was never completed, but appeared on the live record Document and Eyewitness. But while the structure of it is very 154, the sound is about what you’d expect from Wire since the early 2000s – blunt force, but with a tone so clean and processed that it sounds antiseptic. This approach suits the song very well, because Colin Newman’s voice seems so cold and detached that his lyrics about a spy panicking as his cover is blown that telling the story in the first place seems like an exercise in sadism. But, you know, Wire is like that.

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