I love Wire, and to have their first three (best) albums in one tidy package is a great bonus for folks who haven't heard them before. The range of musical styles they covered in this period (1977-79) is astounding, and STILL sounds cutting edge, all these years later.

The debut "Pink Flag" took punk minimalism to the nth degree, way better than anybody else, and remains a definitive, awe-inspiring album. Each song is short, sweet, and to the point -- but what's neat is that there is so much in them that they leave you breathless, despite being so short. My personal favorite tunes "12 X U", "Pink Flag", and "Lowdown" all have lovely, gritty monochord riffs (they claimed their lack of know-how at the time led to this style of play; I love it!) This disc also contains a few bonus tracks at the end (as do all of the CDs in this set).

The follow-up "Chairs Missing" (mislabeled in the Amazon listing as "Disc 3") is very different from the debut, with a more keyboard-based sound, and longer songs, and less punky cheekiness and more calculated, passive-aggressive musical malice. I love both cuts of "Outdoor Miner" (one is a bonus; a light and lovely tune), "Heartbeat" and the epic "Mercy" (which builds into a titanic wall of sound). There is a lot of tasty ear candy on this CD, in terms of great sounds, so wear it with headphones and enjoy the nifty mixes.

The third album, "154" is even more different from the other two, much more produced, still broodier, with almost a science fiction feel to it. My personal favorites are "the 15th" (a magnificent alternapop tune that I've listened to over and over again), "A Touching Display" (longer still, creating a dense, threatening soundscape) "40 Versions" (cool, throbbing beat that makes me think of the old video game, "Berserk") and "Song I" (a perky Europop instrumental, a rhythm-soaked nod from the drummer, Robert Gotobed). The other bonus tracks on this CD are really creepy, sort of ambient music sound, very machine-driven.

There is so much good stuff on these albums I can't do justice to it in this review. You are well-advised to pick this collection up; you will not regret it. It seems Wire got lost in the 1977 punk shuffle (as people went with more accessible bands), but perhaps that's because they were so hard to pigeonhole, soundwise, traversing from pure punk minimalism to heavily-produced alterna-artpop in a mere three albums. But they still mesmerize, impress, and amaze. Viva Wire!

...Critic Jon Savage memorably termed this band in his exhaustive history of the UK '70's punk rock moment, England's Dreaming. Wire were the jokers in the punk rock deck because despite their caustic vocals, tiny 3-chord songs, nervous rhythms, and abrasive guitar tone, they were not punks at all, but mordant art students who sought to subvert musical expectations by burying a dozen small surprises within every fragmentary anthem. For Wire, 3-chord punk songs were a found object to tinker with, turn inside out, parody, and subvert from within. While their contemporaries The Sex Pistols proclaimed "Anarchy in the UK" and the Clash vowed to bring down a "White Riot," Wire's brand of overturning the welfare state status quo was quieter, funnier, and more unsettling:

"I am the fly in the oinment/I can spread more disease than the fleas which nibble away at your window display/Yes I am the fly in the ointment/I'll shake you down to say please as you accept the next dose of disease..."

This trilogy of masterpieces, recorded from '77-'79, is right up there with Velvet Underground and Nico, the Beatles' Revolver, and Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn as examples of throwing out all the rules of song-writing, production, etc. and re-building the pop music model from scratch.

First album "Pink Flag," their masterpiece, is a cohesive suite of 21 2-minute minimalist punk songs that, in lead singer Colin Newman's words, "swerved" rather than rocked. After a first listen, it becomes apparent that you've just heard one long song, not 22. Wire took the template of 3-chord guitar/bass/drums punk and made it strange and unsettling, wringing every structural peculiarity imaginable from the seemingly rigid format -- and once this album takes root in your head, damned if it doesn't stay in your head for weeks. Lyric subject-matter includes media inundation and all manner of veiled sexual paranoia.

Second album "Chairs Missing" stretches out from the punk format (it's here that they earned their nickname "Punk Floyd".) Less frenetic, longer songs with more eccentric structures, off-kilter rhythms,keyboards, woodwinds, and peculiar guitar effects leading them to electronica. A little reminiscent of Eno's "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy." And the song "Outdoor Miner" is the most gorgeous love song to a beetle ever written.

Third album "154" runs with the Eno-esque electronica latent in "Chairs Missing." Treated instruments, mechanical beats, song lengths stretching out into soundscapes, ominous spoken word fragments,industrial clatter, but underneath the noises their pop-sense is unerring and their twisted, catchy song structures stay lodged in the brain long after the album is over. Choice cut: "Map Ref. 41 degrees latitude North, 93 degrees longitude west," the loveliest ode to a field in Iowa as seen from the air ever written, and Wire's most ecstatic moment on record.

Wire broke up and re-formed many times after these three records, but never touched the achievements of this trilogy again. [though their last reunion at the beginning of this decade, the album "Send" roars like Motorhead, absolutely ferocious and atypically crude.] This box set brings together those 3 albums and rare, stray singles from the era; it is a unique, highly influential melding of UK art-rock and punk,and while "Pink Flag" may tower over the other 2, all three are essential listening. Kafka and Beckett form a garage band...

DISCOGRAPHICAL WARNING: there are multiple incarnations of these three albums; this box and the separate early '90's reissues are the only versions with the essential 45's/rarities "Options R," "Dot-Dash," and "Former Airline," as well as the less essential 4-song instrumental LP initially attached to 154. The recent "Digitally Remastered" versions lack these songs, and are to be avoided -- those named songs are key Wire tunes, and outside of 7-inch vinyl that costs in the three figures on Ebay, this is the only way you can get 'em. Seek out this box or the '90's separate reissues instead of the shiny new parsimonious versions.

Wire was a blassed anomaly in the punk world, denying all attempts to categorize them as anything but brilliant. "Artpunk"? nah... "Progpunk"? nope... See, nothing works. Amazing & very influential stuff. REM & the Minutemen both have publicly praised the genre-bending work of Wire.

Wire were a seminal art-punk band that put out a bunch of albums. Three of those albums were absolute classics. All three of those albums are present in this package. You should probably go buy it. So there you go.