Wire - 9:30 Club - Oct 11 2008

A band who's name escapes me opened proceedings with instrumental music featuring four wailing guitars, a couple of drummers and others creating ambient psychedelia which worked quite well. Enjoyable and worth seeing.

Wire came out with three original members, all but BC Gilbert (guitar). They featured a lot of newer material which was edgy and pretty decent in that it hearkened closer to Chairs Missing and 154 as opposed to the much more inconsistent middle period. They did slowly work in songs from all three albums and did two two-song encores with a blistering 12xu finishing off the evening. They cut loose and attacked the material much better than I thought they would.

This was far better than the reemergence into the scene at their 1987 show I witnessed. At that show, they had a new (fourth) album out which was pretty much all they played not touching a note from their classic first three lps. They did give the attendees a nice opener in a band called the Ex-Lion Tamers whose set consisted of playing the Pink Flag album in its entirety in album order.

So a good show with expectations a bit lowered based on my experience. I am surprised to read some comments expecting more older material. We were lucky to get what we did, and more importantly, they had the spirit of the old material more in place than they did in the late 80s and 90s.