Album: Githead

Profile, SWIM

Last year's Headgit mini-album heralded a new lease of life for guitar rock in the musical scheme of Wire's Colin Newman, who had for a couple of decades focused on discreet electronic soundscapes. Profile continues the forays into industrial-dub-groove territory made by Newman with his partner Malka Spigel and Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud, their riffs recalling the heyday of Joy Division and PiL - and, yes, Wire, whose sense of the mysterious in everyday life is mirrored here in tracks such as "They Are" and "Cosmology for Beginners". The puncturing of pretension by bathetic irony in lines such as: "Grasping for meaning/ Trailing my senses/ In writing descriptions/ For parking offences," is a typically Wire-some gambit, as is the sardonic appropriation of jargon in "Option Paralysis": "Balance risk against potential/ Create your own special pet/ Innovative professionals/ Adept at removing history..." Save for a couple of tracks to which Spigel brings a more enigmatic European tone, the lyrics are mostly d

Last year's Headgit mini-album heralded a new lease of life for guitar rock in the musical scheme of Wire's Colin Newman, who had for a couple of decades focused on discreet electronic soundscapes. Profile continues the forays into industrial-dub-groove territory made by Newman with his partner Malka Spigel and Robin "Scanner" Rimbaud, their riffs recalling the heyday of Joy Division and PiL - and, yes, Wire, whose sense of the mysterious in everyday life is mirrored here in tracks such as "They Are" and "Cosmology for Beginners". The puncturing of pretension by bathetic irony in lines such as: "Grasping for meaning/ Trailing my senses/ In writing descriptions/ For parking offences," is a typically Wire-some gambit, as is the sardonic appropriation of jargon in "Option Paralysis": "Balance risk against potential/ Create your own special pet/ Innovative professionals/ Adept at removing history..." Save for a couple of tracks to which Spigel brings a more enigmatic European tone, the lyrics are mostly declaimed with self-mocking precision, over arrangements that pit his and Rimbaud's guitars in combinations of jangly arpeggios, sheets of distortion, choppy rhythm licks and steely lead lines, all anchored by Spigel's loping Wobble-esque dub basslines and at times brutal drum-machine beats. The results cohere into a sonic juggernaut.