#260 The Best Album of 1989, Round 1 Match #22: Laurie Anderson vs. Wire
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 1989 match is:
#52 Laurie Anderson, STRANGE ANGELS
vs.
#77 Wire, IT'S BEGINNING TO AND BACK AGAIN
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
We have two Designated Cheerleaders today, and they’re both for IT’S BEGINNING TO AND BACK AGAIN! First up, it’s @kevinalexander.bsky.social with an article that he originally published on his newsletter here. Take it away, Kevin!
When I was a soccer coach, most players had one or two go-to moves, got pretty good at them, and then got complacent. It was fairly predictable. It’s also incredibly easy to coach against.
Much better—and much more interesting—were the players unafraid to do what I (very professionally) referred to as trying shit. These players might not have been blessed with speed or height, but their superpower was unpredictability. [You could say they may not have been in a “Blessed State” with an “Advantage in Height.” I’m sorry Kevin, I’ll shut up now. — Ed.]
These players always had a spot on my roster.
Similarly, Wire has never been afraid to experiment with new sounds, bend genres, and ignore convention.
In other words, they've never been afraid to try shit.
Of course, Wire is the band that gave us Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154, arguably one of the best three record runs of our time. They followed that by splitting up for several years.
“There are those who say Wire was the best punk band ever because it broke all of the rules, didn’t stick with any of the blueprints and did actually what it wanted…I just wouldn’t call that punk, personally. Punk is just one of those words that’s so overused that you have no idea what it means anymore.”
~Wire frontman Colin Newman
In 1985, they reunited and again tried something new, this time swapping jagged guitars and minimalism for a more electronic sound. They had found synthesizers on their hiatus and embraced them. Signed to Mute, they delivered a 1-2 punch of 1987’s The Ideal Copy in 1987 and A Bell Is A Cup…Until It Is Struck the next year. The band’s live sound was always quite different from what listeners experienced on the records—mainly because the technology they used to create the music in those days wasn’t exactly easy to load in the van and take on the road.
Nevertheless, there was a growing demand from fans for a live record. That could’ve been easy. Record a show or two, clean the tapes up in post-production, and ship units. Simple enough. But Wire’s never been one to take the easy route. Instead, they decided to try something new.
Enter It’s Beginning To And Back Again(“IBTABA”)
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The quick and dirty story of IBTABA is that the record is 11 alternate takes, half from The Ideal Copy and A Bell… and the rest previously unreleased. Describing it that way is also reductive. The wire didn’t just mix things up; they took the songs, dismantled them, and rebuilt them using overdubbed guitar, synth, and vocals—most of the drum parts stayed. The results are (almost) wholly new tracks.
An album of remixes also often represents a creative drought, a cash grab, or both. And those indictments would have been justified had these been straightforward reworkings. But they’re not; they’re complete revampings and remodeling of what previously existed. In many cases, the titles are the only recognizable things left standing.
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Experiments sometimes represent breakthroughs; sometimes, they end up with shattered glass on the lab floor. One of the knocks against IBTABA is that it’s a mixed bag. Some of the songs are brilliant, and some are… not.
“Finest Drops” is heavier than the originals, and that extra bounce makes for a superior version. The grit and bleak imagery of “German Shepherds” benefit similarly from a revamping here (IBTABA’s title is derived from a line in this song). And most people agree that this version of “In Vivo” is much worse than the original mix. It’s also worth noting that it wasn’t included on the original vinyl release and was only added later when the label wanted another single. If A Bell Is A Cup…Until it Is Struck represents peak pop for the band, this record represents an intentional dive back toward the experimental.
The 12” version of “Eardrum Buzz” (the second single) is here and is as radio-friendly as the band gets. In the opinion of this writer, the 12” is light years better than the original, and the original isn’t bad. It was also the on-ramp to the band for many, thanks to decent rotation on MTV. At the opposite end of the spectrum are tracks like “Over Theirs,” which was likely the off-ramp for those same fans, and why you saw so many copies of IBTABA in the cutout bin not too long after the record was released.
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Distilled down, IBTABA represents some amazing results and some…not so amazing ones. It’s a signpost that marks the band’s second era and closes the book on the Pink Flag/Chairs Missing/154 triad for good. Call Wire what you will; at this point in their career, they might’ve still embraced the punk ethos writ large, but the days of playing punk music were done and dusted.
There is also a timing issue, of course. 1989 was a seminal year for albums; the calendar was packed with great releases—and IBTABA isn’t in line with any of them. If you wanted comfortable, indie, or “college rock,” this wasn’t the record for you. But if you like unpredictability and bands opposed to complacency, then IBTABA checks a lot of boxes.
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Terrific stuff, Kevin! Thank you! Next up, it’s… me?? That’s right, your humble host is dipping his toes in the DC game once again. He even managed to keep it to about 1000 words! Our little boy is growing up. If you’re lucky (“lucky”) you’ll see more from him later in the tournament. Take it away, uh, me!
Wire, IT'S BEGINNING TO AND BACK AGAIN (1989)
Will they say yeah? Will they say no?
I haven't written a Designated Cheerleader in, I believe, years. However, I feel I've been pulled back in, Godfather Part III-style, by the surprising inclusion of IT'S BEGINNING TO AND BACK AGAIN into the tournament. I feel it's my responsibility to explain this album, to try to get at why I like it and what it means to me, because I fear, rightly or wrongly, I'm the reason it's here in the first place. IBTABA was on my shortlist of all-time favorite 1989 albums, which I provided as one bloc of recommendations. Ten of the thirteen made it in. (You guys couldn't find room for Nitzer Ebb, The Young Gods, or Renegade Soundwave? he asked, ungratefully.) As IBTABA was probably the most obscure of the ten, I needed to step up.
So, what is IBTABA? It's Wire's live album derived from the tour supporting their then-latest studio album, A BELL IS A CUP UNTIL IT IS STRUCK. Except.. it's not a live album, at least not how we usually think of them. The band took recordings of performances in Portugal, London, and Chicago, then began wiping them clean, instrument by instrument, track by track, and then rebuilt them in the studio. As Colin Newman explained in the Wire oral history by Kevin S. Eden, Everybody Loves A History, "We literally took the live mult-track, copied them over, and started erasing, apart from the drums, or an odd noise, or a bass line. Whatever we felt we could work with." Paul Stanley of KISS, talking about another album made 14 years previously, might have put it this way: "It was as live as it needed to be."
Okay. But why, er? Well, I would submit two possible reasons. One, they're Wire, and have always aggressively marched to the beat of their own drummer their entire career. (Except, uh, when their drummer quit. Bygones!) So the traditional idea of a live-album-as-tour-memorabilia was likely an non-starter with them. Two, according to Newman in History, "at least three-quarters" of the band didn't like A BELL IS A CUP, that it wasn't "spontaneous enough." Despite thinking CUP is a fucking masterpiece, I will put on my critc cap, slip into their shoes, and submit that there is a rigid coldness to the album, possibly from letting the keyboards and synthesizers and guitars that sound like keyboards and synthesizers take the wheel. Closed-off? Overdetermined? I can see that. (I'd also suggest those are its virtues.) IBTABA gave them the chance to re-record some of those tracks, combining the energy and atmosphere of a concert with new, studio-assisted ideas.
And looking at it from that vantage point, and listening to the result, it makes sense. CUP is the sound of an impending Anna Kavan-esque ice age, the capitalist world descending into a deep freeze. IBTABA thaws out some of those songs, gets them a little more limber. "Finest Drops" leaves behind the original's seasick rhythm for a something more propulsive and danceable. I daresay these versions of "German Shepherds" and "Public Place" are the best, with "Public Place" still dirge-y, but replaces the "Creep"-style guitar stabs with some pretty flamenco-esque picking, and "German Shepherds" (I believe the third version they'd made at this point) finally blossoming into the song it was meant to be. One of my favorite moments on the album is "Shepherd"'s "don't start me off" part, which in previous versions just floated by, but here is given space to hit. The synths underneath, that sound like some kind of sampled choir, gives me goosebumps every time. These versions of "It's A Boy" and "Boiling Boy" are great as well, that for me stand side by side with the originals. As the little girl said, "Why not both?"
Then there's the bonus tracks. Normally, I'd consider bonus tracks on a tournament album to be non-canon, but every so often there's an album where I consider the bonus tracks to be an integral part of the listening experience. IBTABA is one of those albums. These bonus tracks were not live reclamations, but studio creations. They're also three of Wire's best singles ever. You may have heard "Eardrum Buzz" — they made a supremely silly video for it — but here you get to compare the "Kidney Bingos"-esque studio version to the "live" version, as clear a demonstration as any that Wire hates to repeat themselves. "In Vivo" is pure crystalline dancelfoor ecstasy. But if you were to only listen to one track on the whole album, I'd offer "The Offer," simply the prettiest thing Wire ever recorded, yes, even prettier than "Outdoor Miner" you heard me.
But here's the thing, and why having this album in the tournament is a bit of a head trip for me. If you've never heard this album, or if you've never heard Wire in this phase of their career, or heaven forfend, you've never heard Wire, I can't even begin to imagine how this album sounds to you. I first heard Wire, not from any of their classic '70s output, but from the single "Ahead" from THE IDEAL COPY when it played on 120 Minutes, or whatever alternative show MTV had in 1987. This era of Wire was my Wire, and I charted their growth in real time. I could see how "Ahead," a song made of guitars that sounds like a sequencer, led to the experiments of IBTABA which ultimately led to 1991's THE DRILL, an album that's Wire stumbling upon IDM like how Bugs Bunny makes wrong turns at Albuquerque. But if you don't have that context… do these songs work for you? Do they make you want to dance? Do they make you want to think? Do they create any kind of feeling or atmosphere? Could you intuitively sense the live atmosphere hovering in the background? Did you notice any difference when the album went to the studio-only singles? What the hell do you think of "Illuminated"? (I'm still trying to answer that one thirty-six years later.) What do you like? What do you love?
I need to know, but dread it all the same.
Thanks, me!
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Yesterday, #13 Janet Jackson, JANET JACKSON'S RHYTHM NATION 1814 defeated #116 King's X, GRETCHEN GOES TO NEBRASKA 112-34.
Thanks for reading, and voting!
Kent