My Top 20 albums from 1979 No 18

DRUMS & WIRES **1/2

Year Of Release: 1979
Making Plans For Nigel / Helicopter / Day In Day Out / When You're Near Me I Have Difficulty / Ten Feet Tall / Roads Girdle The Globe / Reel By Reel / That Is The Way / Outside World / Scissor Man / Complicated Game

You know, sometimes I do get around to thinking that New Wave might not have been such a good idea after all. Oh sure, you've got your Police, which are just absolutely mind-blowing, and you've got your Talking Heads, which give the word "paranoia" a whole new meaning, and you've got your Cars which are just way cute to dance to. But for every Reggatta De Blanc or Remain In Light you have yourself something like this. Drums & Wires just makes me entirely blow my cool, and not even repeated listenings help.
It's not a bad album, nossiree, at least, not a hopeless one, because it does get an acceptable rating. It has its share of solid melodies, which I'll get to in a minute, right after I bash the stuffing out of everything else. I'll go further and say that almost no songs on here are "uninteresting" - just like in the case of Go 2, you can take any selected tune and it'll turn out exciting on its own. But what I'll also say is that in general perspective, this is where Partridge's and Moulding's fiddling around with New Wave gets extremely stale.
The album simply gives the impression of being way too mechanic, too preconceived, too soulless. Oh sure, so were the previous two. But at least those two had some goddamn energy; the quirky intellectual side of the band presented itself in the untrivial chord changes and lyrics, and their emotional kick-ass side - in the guitar roar, the speed and the fury. Combined together, the two sides really worked. Drums & Wires drops the 'emotional' side entirely. It's like a weird, seriously entangled absurdist concept slowly unravelling itself, but never actually resolving itself. The entire record is filled with songs like 'Roads Girdle The Globe', which are kinda interesting, from a technical point of view, but just way too nerdy and pointless to make any impression. Okay, so 'we're all safe in your concrete robe', that's nice to know, Andy. What else? What's the goddamn feel of that song supposed to be?
The dissonance of 'That Is The Way', as far as I'm concerned, is supposed to produce some kind of "majestic" feel, but it's way too obvious and way too simplistic and, from the other side, way too ear-destructive to be appreciated. 'Scissor Man' is kinda novel in the way Andy goes 'snipping snipping snipping' while the guitar probably imitates the instrument in question, but again, in my mind the song is mainly relegated to "a complicately sounding nothing". I mean, dzhing, it's not really enough for a song to be catchy, a song has to convey something. I dunno, whatever, from teenage lust to Learian absurdity, anything. 'Scissor Man', or a good half of these tunes in general, convey nothing. It's probably a gas to analyze these songs - there's so much going on - but hardly a gas getting entertained by them. That's what happens when you're way too clever, I guess. Hey Mr Partridge! Can we have some of these brains out on a plate?
The absolute nadir is 'Complicated Game', though, arguably the band's worst song after 'All Along The Watchtower'. I'm ready to agree that the lengthy ferocious bacchanalia of the song's coda might appeal to some, but forgive me, I can only tolerate wild screaming when it's done with real gusto and justified - for all I care, there is no emotionality to the song at all, it's just an exercise in noisemaking, and thus pretty similar to the Police's 'Mother'. It's just ugly. There are few songs I really have a hard time sitting through, and this is one of them. Ooh, give me Tim Buckley instead, please.
There, I said it. Now that the worst excesses of New Wave have been pinpointed at, let's discuss the good things. There's a bunch of solid pop tunes on here anyway - and, of course, the best thing happens when the band just drops their quirkiness and "hyper-constructivity" and goes for a simpler (which still is never that simple, of course) approach. 'Making Plans For Nigel', the band's anti-steel industry rant, is a hell of a song, for instance, with a really catchy chorus and a really cute minimalistic guitar riff. 'Helicopter' theoretically belongs to the same pseudo-constructive mess, but at least it's bouncy and funny, and I don't have to spend my days scratching my head in dismay trying to decipher the profound message.
'Ten Feet Tall' is the natural precursor to the band's upcoming major pop period, a boldly-moving acoustic-based ballad with folksy vocal harmonies and nice guitar jangle... did I mention that this is the first album that features new guitarist Dave Gregory? Ha! NOT A SINGLE SONG on here sounds like the Cars now! Barry Andrews is out forever! His legacy still lives on in the crappy half of the record, though, but that wouldn't be for long. 'Real By Reel', or whatever it's called, is also a classy song - now there's a magnificent New Wave guitar riff and a super-duper catchy chorus, just look at the vocal melody resolution, goddammit. And 'Outside World' is pretty much the only reminiscence of the band's punk-influenced beginnings; maybe in the context of White Music it'd be just a piece of filler, but here, tucked in between two energy-devoid exercises in hollow intellectualism, it feels just right. Plus, the bonus tracks are good - particularly the funny 'Life Begins At The Hop'.
So in all, there's enough solid material to guarantee a decent rating, but the record as a whole just doesn't cut it - too much 'drums and wires', too little actual substance. By all accounts, it's a transitional record, of course, but some bands make great transitional records and some make crappy ones, and it's not like if you make a transitional crappy record, you're hopeless, so don't despair! Things would get better.

Featured Songs:
Making Plans For Nigel
Ten Feet Tall