The Instagrammable Charm of the Bourgeoisie by Daniel Penny

While touring England’s Lake District, poet Thomas Gray suffered what we might call a selfie-induced injury. While looking more intently at the reflection of the setting sun in his outstretched hand than at the ground beneath his feet, Gray reports, “I fell down on my back across a dirty lane . . . but broke only my knuckles.” In case his reader was worried, Gray adds that he “stay’d nevertheless, & saw the sun set in all its glory.” Although Gray’s injury took place in 1769, during the rise of the picturesque, his accident resonates in the age of Instagram—a time when clickbait articles regularly report people falling off cliffs, stepping into traffic, and crashing into precarious artworks, all in pursuit of that perfectly Instagrammable moment.  It is tempting to believe that we live in a time uniquely saturated with images. And indeed, the numbers are staggering: Instagrammers upload about 95 million photos and videos every day. A quarter of Americans use the app, and the vast majority of them are under 40. Because Instagram skews so much younger than Facebook or Twitter, it is where “tastemakers” and “influencers” now live online, and where their audiences spend hours each day making and absorbing visual content. But so much of what seems bleeding edge may well be old hat; the trends, behaviors, and modes of perception and living that so many op-ed columnists and TED-talk gurus attribute to smartphones and other technological advances are rooted in the much older aesthetic of the picturesque.

Wealthy eighteenth-century English travelers such as Gray used technology to mediate and pictorialize their experiences of nature just as Instagrammers today hold up their phones and deliberate over filters. To better appreciate the picturesque, travelers in the late 1700s were urged to use what was known as a gray mirror or “Claude glass,” which would simplify the visual field and help separate the subject matter from the background, much like an Instagram filter. Artists and aesthetes would carry these tablet-sized convex mirrors with them, and position themselves with their backs to whatever they wished to behold—the exact move that Gray was attempting when he tumbled into a ditch. The artist and Anglican priest William Gilpin, who is often credited with coining the term “picturesque,” even went so far as to mount a Claude mirror in his carriage so that, rather than looking at the actual scenery passing outside his window, he could instead experience the landscape as a mediated, aestheticized “succession of high-coloured pictures.”

Connections between the Instragrammable and the picturesque go deeper than framing methods, however. The aesthetics are also linked by shared bourgeois preoccupations with commodification and class identity. By understanding how Instagram was prefigured by a previous aesthetic movement—one which arose while the middle class was first emerging—we can come closer to understanding our current moment’s tensions between beauty, capitalism, and the pursuit of an authentic life.

                                                            

                                                           

                                                Thomas Gainsborough

                                           

                                   Artist with a Claude Glass (Self-Portrait?), Pencil

Today you can still find echoes of the picturesque in travel photos on Instagram. A friend’s recent trip to Cuba, for example, will feature leathery old men smoking cigars among palm trees and pastel junkers. Or simply search #VanLife to see an endless stream of vintage Volkswagens chugging through the red desert landscape of the American Southwest. But rather than concentrate on generic similarities between the picturesque and images one finds on Instagram, it is more illuminating to think of how both aesthetics arose from similar socioeconomic and class circumstances—manifesting, according to Price, as images filled with “interesting and entertaining particulars.”

Price’s use of the word “interesting” is significant in understanding the relationship between the picturesque and the Instagrammable. In Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), philosopher Sianne Ngai positions the picturesque as a function of visual interest—of variation and compositional unpredictability—which she connects to the enticements of capitalism. For a scene or a picture to be interesting, she argues, it must be judged in relation to others, one of many. According to Ngai, this picturesque habit began “emerging in tandem with the development of markets.” Unlike beauty, which exalts, or the sublime, which terrifies, Ngai suggests that the picturesque produces an affect somewhere between excitement and boredom. It is a feeling tied to amusement and connoisseurship, like letting one’s eyes wander over a series of window displays.

And so, too, is the Instagrammable, a mode that is inseparable from listless scrolling. The pleasure comes when your eyes alight on that special something, which seems to pop out from the rest. This twinning of artistic and mercantile rapture is best encapsulated by a remark that a young Walpole made to Gray when the two were touring Europe for the first time: “I would buy the Colosseum if I could.” Likewise, there is no point in putting anything on Instragram that is not, in some sense, for sale—even if what is for sale is an abstract possibility unlocked through class belonging.

If we allow that the rise of the picturesque was in part a product of England’s material circumstances in the eighteenth century, then it follows that our own tumultuous economic and technological moment has helped produce the Instagrammable. Broadly speaking, I am talking about neoliberalism, defined by David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade . . . which seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.”

The picturesque was ultimately about situating oneself within the class structure by demonstrating a heightened aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, during a period when land was becoming increasingly commodified. By contrast, the Instagrammable is a product of the neoliberal turn toward the individual. It is therefore chiefly concerned with bringing previously non-commodifiable aspects of the self into the marketplace by turning leisure and lifestyle into labor and goods. Though the two aesthetics share a similar image-making methodology and prize notions of authenticity, the Instagrammable is perhaps even more capacious than its predecessor. Through the alchemy of social media, everything you post, whether it is a self-portrait or not, is transformed into a monetized datapoint and becomes an exercise in personal branding.

Boston Review

Imagine the scene: the rural, wild Lake District became a favorite destination for travelers wielding tinted mirrors and guidebooks, full of tips on improving the neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before they became the butt of jokes by everyone from Jane Austen to William Wordsworth.

Some lines could be pulled fresh from a modern-day critique of Instagram-obsessed travelers. In the 1798 comic opera The Lakers, tourist Beccabunga Veronique is hard at work on a painting that corrects the flaws of the Lake District’s all-too-real landscape. “If it is not like what it is,” she said, “it is like what it ought to be. I have only made it picturesque.”

Wordsworth, a shade-throwing resident of the Lake District, entitled one poem “On Seeing Some Tourists of the Lakes Pass By Reading; a Practice Very Common,” then griped at the distracted visitors: “For this came ye hither? is this your delight?” He frequently complained about the mindless tourists that crowded his favorite spots, and rolled his literary eyes about the use of Claude glasses.

And in 1812, Claude glasses and picturesque travel took a satirical death blow when writer William Combe published The Tour of Doctor Syntax: in search of the picturesque, a parody poem lampooning affected, pretentious tourists. Like William Gilpin and Thomas Gray, Doctor Syntax risked everything for a good view and an impressive story—falling in lakes, getting treed by bulls, and being thrown from horses along the way.

“I’ll make a tour—and then I’ll write it. You know well what my pen can do,” said Doctor Syntax to his wife as he set out to get rich and become a travel influencer. “I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, And picturesque it everywhere.” Or as a 21st-century Doctor Syntax would put it: #travel #blessed #picturesque.

Atlas Obscura

Popular in the 18th century, the Claude glass was a mirror that took the scene behind you and transformed it into something different, much like the filters in Instagram or Hipstamatic promise to do. The Claude glass was a sort of early pocket lens without the camera and it was held aloft to observe a vista over one’s shoulder. The technology was simple: A blackened mirror reduced the tonal values of its reflected landscape, and a slightly convex shape pushed more scenery into a single focal point, reducing a larger vista into a tidy snapshot.

                                                                 

Kottke

The Claude glass is named for Claude Lorrain, a 17th-century landscape painter, whose name in the late 18th century became synonymous with the picturesque aesthetic, although there is no indication he used or knew of it or anything similar. The Claude glass was supposed to help artists produce works of art similar to those of Lorrain. William Gilpin, the inventor of the picturesque ideal, advocated the use of a Claude glass saying, "they give the object of nature a soft, mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master". Gilpin mounted a mirror in his carriage, from where he could take in "a succession of high-coloured pictures ... continually gliding before the eye".

Claude glasses were widely used by tourists and amateur artists, who quickly became the targets of satire. Hugh Sykes Davies (1909 – 1984) observed their facing away from the object they wished to paint, commenting, "It is very typical of their attitude to Nature that such a position should be desirable."

Wikipedia

Also of interest  :

How Instagram is changing the way we design cultural spaces :  As neighborhoods, restaurants and museums become more photogenic, are we experiencing an “Instagramization” of the world?  by Emily Matchar

Some say the Instagramization of the world is leading to a troubling homogeneity. Art and design writer Kyle Chayka suggests social media is spreading a generic hipster aesthetic across the globe. You can travel from London to Los Angeles to Hong Kong and find coffee shops, hotels and offices with the same Instagram-friendly reclaimed wood, industrial lighting, white walls and “pops” of color.

Smithsonian Mag

Three amazing songs and videos : Losing all sense by Grizzly Bear, Propagation by Com Truise and New York by St. Vincent.

Watch Grizzly Bear’s spectacularly weird new video.

When they quietly went on hiatus after touring their critically-devoured fourth album Shields back in 2013, no one really knew if they would hear from Grizzly Bear again. Formed as the solo project of Brooklyn-based musician Ed Droste back in 2002, the band expanded to comprise guitarist and vocalist Daniel Rossen (of Department of Eagles), bassist Chris Taylor, and drummer Christopher Bear. Over the course of four full-length records – each as vivid and vital as the next – Grizzly Bear’s brand of carefully-crafted, harmony-driven indie rock melded nuance, musicianship, and heart like few others.

Droste and co. have just released one of the albums of the year, Painted Ruins, and it’s the sound of a band who have returned positively invigorated. Even for an act whose music has often betrayed an uncanny devotion to small detail, it’s a masterclass in intent-drenched songwriting, brimming with exquisite tonal flourishes, experimental pop tangents, and a huge mood of import and solidarity. From the sweeping four-part harmonies and sonic wanderlust of lead singles “Three Rings” and “Mourning Sound” to the virtuosic art-rock finesse of the likes of “Aquarian” and “Four Cypresses”, Painted Ruins is also easily the band’s most collaborative album to date.

Why was ‘Losing All Sense’ chosen as the new single? And tell me about its accompanying visuals.

Ed Droste: There’s a lot of factors behind why singles get picked, and I’m not always the one who chooses it per se. I just go with the flow. But ‘Losing All Sense’ felt like an upbeat, fun thing to release. The video is even more of a dichotomy – it’s like David Lynch meets the The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills meets Heathers or something. It’s kind of campy and dark and surreal. I’m so excited for it to come out. It’s starring my friend Busy Philipps, another friend Freckle who’s an actress and a prominent genderfluid figure, and others. And it’s directed by a good old friend of ours, Cody Critcheloe from the band Ssion. He did an amazing job on a video for Robyn a year or so ago, and he’s an amazing musician, artist, and director. It’s a real trip. It’s a jaunty song with a surreal, campy video with sad lyrics. It’s three vibes all mixed together.

Dazed

Replicant lady finds classic way out of unhappy relationship with owner in "Propagation"

Replicant lady finds classic way out of unhappy relationship with owner in "Propagation"

 

 

Propagation is the latest from Com Truise, with an excellent video to go with it by Will Joines & Karrie Crouse, shot by Zoë White and starring Trieste Kelly Dunn and Stephen O'Reilly. It has that ideal 2010s look: the technological landscape of the 1950s with the emotional atmosphere of the 1980s and a select reading of everything in between, and nothing before or after. Well-trodden ground, sure, but the footsteps are perfect. From the new LP, Iteration.

 

 

Boing Boing

 

Alex Da Corte Directs a Luminous Video for St. Vincent’s Ode to New York.

 

I want a swan as a pet now, thanks to St. Vincent’s new music video for her single, “New York,” which honestly makes me well up every time I hear it. Chances are you’ve seen the candy-colored, surreal clip, which dropped earlier today; savvy viewers might have also realized that the work is actually an Alex Da Corte production.

Like Da Corte’s own installations, the three-minute video exists in a whole other world of hyper-artificiality, with colors all electric and everyday objects made uncanny. St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, reclines on a purple set with the aforementioned swan; sings into a burning bushel of greens; and dries her nails while smoking. Famous New York City public artworks fittingly make cameos: we see Clark reading the newspaper on Forrest Myers’ “The Wall” in Soho, and slowly turning Bernard Rosenthal’s “Alamo,” or the Astor Place Cube.

Da Corte explained the visuals in a short statement: “I think Annie’s New York is the New York of my dreams — one that is blurry and fractured, dreamy and flat,” he said. “It is the Toontown to my Hollywood. It is beautiful but slightly out of reach.”

His bright vision is an unexpected complement to St. Vincent’s lament, which begins with the aching and extremely relatable line, “New York isn’t New York without you, love,” before delving into more heartbreak.

 

Hyperallergic

 

Lucrecia Martel emerges from the wilderness with a strange, sensual wonder

Lucrecia Martel is the elusive poet of Latin-American cinema, missing believed lost, the Mary Celeste in human form. She made La Cienaga and The Holy Girl; split the Cannes audience in two with her brilliant, maddening The Headless Woman. And then, all at once, Martel seemed to vanish. There were rumours that she had been unwell, or that she spent years kick-starting a stalled science-fiction picture, or that she’d embarked on a long boat trip right up the Amazon. I think I like the third option the best. It makes her sound like Mr Kurtz.

The Guardian

The making of the film came out of a personal journey for Ms. Martel herself. The abandoned work on the science-fiction film was also for an adaptation, “El Eternauta,” a cult comic in Argentina. Ms. Martel was no stranger to career challenges; she largely taught herself filmmaking in the 1990s when the country’s economic crisis hobbled the state film school she had entered. But the aborted project was a confusing blow. Seeking a way out of her dismay, she decided to take a trip on the Paraná River. “I had a wooden boat, completely unsuitable for that adventure,” Ms. Martel said, recalling temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius and “all kinds of insects, tremendous summer storms, my meager experience as a captain in a fierce river.”

She took along a few books and “many photocopies of 18th-century expeditions on rivers in South America.” One of the books she packed was Di Benedetto’s novel. “There I read ‘Zama,’” Ms. Martel said, summing up her reaction in a single word: “euphoria.”

New York Times

Now Martel is back, after a nine-year absence, with the astonishing Zama, adapted from a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, about an 18th-century Spanish colony perched on the Asuncion coast. Her film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic. It arrives in Venice as if blown in from another world.   Audaciously, Martel refuses to provide date or a location, let alone any handy background information. She’d rather set us down at the water’s edge and leave us to find our own way from there, mixed in amid the other colonialists and settlers who cling to this desolate lip of the land, sweating buckets beneath their periwigs.

Soon enough we encounter Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho). He serves as the crown’s magistrate, a Spanish functionary, but his pleas for a transfer are being constantly rebuffed. He’s pining for home, for cold weather; lying in the grass to ogle women bathing and dreaming of “Russian princesses wrapped up in their furs”. Beyond the settlement there is the jungle, the wilds. This is reputed to contain masked warriors, painted ghouls and a terrifying brigand named Vicuna, who may already be dead, assuming he ever existed at all. But these, perhaps, are mere distractions. Basically Zama is a film about a man who waits, unhappily, for his own release.

The Guardian

The film’s uncompromising aesthetic and deliberate pace may prove too steep a hurdle for many a viewer, even for those who wowed by the director’s previous films. While films like “The Headless Woman” and “The Holy Girl” also tied themselves to the lead’s subjective experience, both took place in the here-and-now, benefitting from a readily understandable context wholly apart from the alien colonial world of “Zama.” By eschewing any real exposition or situational cues, Martel forces viewers to either go all in all at once, or to never meaningfully connect.

Viewers that are willing to meet the film at its very particular wavelength will find themselves lulled into a state of confused delirium. As Zama meanders through his outskirts post, he finds himself in a number of recurring situations. There are the frequent visits with Luciana (Lola Dueñas), a colonial matron who constantly rebuffs his advances, or his repeated visits with local governor, played by three different actors so to indicate the cruel advance of time while our lead remains maddeningly inert. Often in lieu of linear dialogue the script will repeat the same lines again and again, using them as kind of incantation to bring on that state of feverishness.

As the film goes on, that delirium will infect the very dialogue itself. Characters will deliver lines out of conversational order, as if an actor tasked with reading three sentences delivered them in any he or she chose. Sometimes the fever attacks grammar itself, like at one point, where Zama looks to native girl who may or may not be his former mistress and notes, “that boy, she’s holding my son.”

Indiewire

It’s once Zama finally takes his fate into his own hands — leaving the colony to join a band of soldiers in pursuit of a notorious scoundrel who may or may not exist — that the film dares to breathe, even if the breaths seem likely at any minute to turn to final gasps. At this point, merely escaping stasis for an equally futile but moving target is the best Zama can hope for, and Martel takes redemptive beauty where she can find it. The camera steps back to take in open-skied vistas, restful island melodies creep into the soundscape, and the overriding palette switches from rich, overripe shades of chartreuse and mustard to cleaner, kinder primaries — one of them blood-red, of course, but the anxious, possibly alluring promise of death is the most unwavering fixture of this defiantly difficult, finally exhilarating vision.

Variety

J.M. Coetzee on the book :  A Great Writer We should Know

Zama is a prickly character. He holds a degree in letters and does not like it when the locals are not properly respectful. He suspects that people mock him behind his back, that plots are being cooked up to humiliate him. His relations with women—which occupy most of the novel—are characterized by crudity on the one hand and timidity on the other. He is vain, maladroit, narcissistic, and morbidly suspicious; he is prone to accesses of lust and fits of violence, and endowed with an endless capacity for self-deception.

He is also the author of himself, in a double sense. First, everything we hear about him comes from his own mouth, including such derogatory epithets as “swaggering” and “dogslayer,” which suggest a certain ironic self-awareness. Second, his day-to-day actions are dictated by the promptings of his unconscious, or at least his inner self, over which he makes no effort to assert conscious control. His narcissistic pleasure in himself includes the pleasure of never knowing what he will get up to next, and thus of being free to invent himself as he goes along.
On the other hand—as he intermittently recognizes—his indifference to his deeper motives may be generating his many failures: “Something greater, I knew not what, a kind of potent negation, invisible to the eye,…superior to any strength I might muster or rebellion I might wage,” may be dictating his destiny. It is his self-cultivated lack of inhibition that leads him to launch an unprovoked knife attack on the only colleague who is well disposed toward him, then to sit back while the young man takes the blame and loses his job.

 The New York Review of Books

Unsolved Mystery

Unsolved Mystery. 

Misunderstood upon its 2007 release, ‘Zodiac’ now stands as one of the great films of the century. A look back on this postmodern, hyper-realistic, obsessive mystery film about cops, a famous killer, newspapers, and the puzzle that stumped a city.

More than any American movie of the past decade, Zodiac accepts and embraces irresolvability, which may be why it’s so hypnotically rewatchable. If it’s a cosmic drama, it’s one that works on macro and micro levels. Its depiction of the hunt for the most notorious and mysterious serial killer of the 20th century is at once suggestive of larger cultural shifts while also being detailed down to the inch. Reviewing the film for the Village Voice in 2007, Nathan Lee perceptively called it an "orgy of empiricism," noting that for the first time, Fincher’s micro-managerial directorial style was being applied to historical material. The same fanaticism that held up production on Alien 3 and pushed Fight Club over budget was now angled as a guarantor of authenticity.

Fincher is a scrupulous blue-printer with a reputation for control freakery. What Zodiac represented was an attempt to leverage those skills in the service of ambiguity — to make a work more open to interpretation than its predecessors. In Se7en, Brad Pitt finds out whose head is in the box; in Fight Club, Edward Norton finds out who’s really in his head (spoiler: it’s Brad Pitt). In those films, Fincher orchestrated sharp, jagged storytelling twists that tore their narrative universes apart. In Zodiac, the fabric of reality is stretched so tight over the action that it threatens to break at any moment. Except that it doesn’t. The twist is that there isn’t one.

The Ringer

Wire Reflect on 40 Years as Punk's Ultimate Cult Band

Their 16th studio album, Silver/Lead – due out Friday, during Wire's Drill Los Angeles festival – finds the group exploring fuzzy, atmospheric synths and more traditional song structures. Wire's members have always fancied themselves to be Dadaists, thumbing their noses at tradition, but here they've created a work of anti-Dada – a stark inverse of Pink Flag, full of regular-length songs with bells and whistles and the heavy influence of Berlin-era Bowie. And yet, Silver/Lead songs like the urgent "Sonic Lens" and throbbing "Playing Harp for the Fishes" vibrate with inexplicable anxiety, Wire's signature since the beginning. It's a testament to the band's insistence on seeing through their vision from all possible angles.

                                                                     

                                                                               

 

Once the chaos cleared, the vision of the group's four members – Newman, Lewis, guitarist Bruce Gilbert and drummer Robert Gotobed ­– came into focus. "I didn't like rock & roll music – to me it was kind of old Fifties music – but I was into psychedelic pop of the Sixties," Newman recalls. "I knew that for Wire, I was going to have to write a very stripped-back type of song. It was very weird in the beginning, because I didn't play guitar well. Bruce, who used to be in a blues group, played only in an open tuning – where you put one finger on the strings to make a chord – so everything was in major chords, and I couldn't be doing with that, so I set about writing material that I thought was a reinvention of the idea of rock music. It was ditching the whole rock & roll thing and making something more straightforward, more brutal."

"We became rather fascinated with the beginning and endings of songs and putting shocking stops in – like the one in '12XU,'" Lewis says. "The shorter songs developed naturally. When the words ran out, Colin said, 'That's it.' We went, 'Yes, why not?' It used to drive the punks nuts. They'd sort of get pogoing, and then it would stop. We always thought it was really funny."
Wire played their first official concert as a four-piece on April 1st, 1977. A recording of the show, released as Live at the Roxy, London in 2006, finds the group playing a handful of raucous-yet-taut Pink Flag ragers, as well as the Ramones-y Overload holdover "Mary Is a Dyke" and hyper-speed J.J. Cale and Dave Clark Five covers. "I must say, the first gig was very inauspicious," Newman says. "I think we played to about three-and-a-half people. I mean, the club was the size of a toilet, but still, three-and-a-half didn't look full."

Most of the songs on Pink Flag came out organically by trying ideas, according to Lewis. "12XU" came from counting off songs "one, two, fuck you." "We thought, 'Wouldn't it be good to invent self-censorship?'" the bassist says with a laugh. "Then the ideas kept spiraling along. 'Let's have an intro in French [as in "Surgeon's Girl"].' Or, 'This song sounds a bit Brazilian ["Brazil"], so let's do a Brazilian version and, there you go, 'Three Girl Rumba.' It was an acceleration of ideas. And as we played, our skill level was going up and we were getting tighter, and the tighter we got, the funnier it was with the stopping and starting.

"Something that's kind of lost in history is that when you would go see the Sex Pistols playing in the pubs around London, the great thing about them is it was funny," he continues. "They were funny. And you either got it, or people hated it. For us, it was very much the Dada tradition, that it should be provocative and it can be nonsense and can be funny. And the Pistols were hilarious. They used to cover my favorite trash songs like 'Here Comes the Nice' by the Small Faces or something by the Monkees. It had that absurdity to it, and that absurdity really appealed to us."
 

"Pink Flag is like a blueprint, and it's simple," Lewis says about why he thinks that era of the group struck so many musicians. "It's unusual in its arrangements and the lyrics are unusual. You have something like '12XU,' which is about queerness and it's transgender-based, not that anybody noticed. Then 'Pink Flag' is a complete piece of imagination, and 'Field Day for the Sundays' is about the real progress of the yellow press, destroying sports stars lives because of their sexual activities. I think it had a more unusual and perhaps inventive view of politics. I think that's what attracted people, as well as the cover. Bruce and I both came up with the same image independently." He recalls that the band's label sent copies of the LP to Bob Dylan and Neil Young, prompting the latter to write back that he thought it was great.

Despite its apparent influence, Pink Flag didn't chart in the U.K. Although Chairs Missing made it into the Top 50 the following year and 1979's 154 would go into the Top 40, an act of music-industry politics stymied the band's progress. After the release of Chairs Missing's "Outdoor Miner" single, the record company was caught attempting to help it along illegally, doing something akin to payola, and the song subsequently plummeted on the charts. Lewis still harbors resentment over the matter and thinks about an alternate universe where Wire went on to play Top of the Pops.

                                                             

Their latest, Silver/Lead – for which Lewis would send Newman text, so Newman could arrive at the studio with finished songs – has been in the works for some time. The group paced its recording sessions so that the LP would be pressed and ready to go for its 40th anniversary. "There's a don't-look-back aspect to Wire," Newman says. "Wire is always about what we're doing now, what we're doing next. And an anniversary could easily be an excuse for wallowing in our own past, but instead putting out a new album and launching it with a Drill Festival in L.A., instead of playing in a basement in Covent Garden, where we started. We've had this plan for about five years.

"With Wire, we approach things as if we were a band in our twenties or thirties, and we do albums quite often," he continues. "We tour as regularly as we can, and we don't get offered those great festival headliners because we're not playing the classical albums. We might not be playing huge venues, but we make it work. I've never had a day job. I think figuring out how to survive as a creative person in his world is quite an important thing to do."

 Rolling Stone

Wire    Silver / Lead

As the originators of UK post-punk enter their fifth decade, they write with a natural-born ease—uncomplicated music cruising under lyrics that question progress and our ability to move forward.

There is one line that gives a clue as to what Silver/Lead is about: “The path that is progress is under repair.” Throughout the album’s 10 tracks, our narrator seems intent on moving forward, but is unsure how, or whether it’s even possible. References to roads and motion make the album feel like a travelogue; there are multiple songs featuring boats and rivers. But Silver/Lead also poses questions it can’t quite answer. As “Short Elevated Period,” one of the album’s few up-tempo tracks, puts it: “My reasons for living were under review...Standing in the road, where would I go to?”

This tension between wanting to move and wondering how to do it enlivens songs that might otherwise feel inert. The pep talk of “Diamonds in Cups” (“The course of creation is often quite strange/Keep your mind open, be willing to change”) gains energy from uncertainty. A similar pressure emerges in “This Time,” which admits that “some folks claim they know all the answers” yet still insists “This time it’s going to be better.” One track, “An Alibi,” is nothing but questions, though its pessimism feels buoyed by the music’s confident swing.

Pitchfork 

Listen to This Time on YouTube

This Time 

All lyrics from LP Silver/Lead 

Their official site : Pinkflag

 Pinkflag