Consumer Guide Album

Wire: On Returning (1977-1979) [Restless Retro, 1989]
With Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154 all back in catalogue on the same label, there's a sense in which this compilation is de trop. Drawing heavily on all three, not as effective a unit as Pink Flag yet kicking off with thirteen of that masterpiece's twenty-one cuts, failing to convert this original skeptic to such 154 indulgences as "The Other Window" and the deadly "A Touching Display," mastermind Jon Savage presents a lovingly literal best-of rather than a half-collectorama half-intro like the 1984 Sneaky Pete anthology. But does it hold up, grabbing your collar with one brief, bitter tune after another for almost the entirety of a thirty-one-cut CD. They're not the only punks whose public protests eventually revealed their roots in personal frustration. But their plaints don't seem merely private. They seem emblematic of a time whose cruelties didn't begin and end with alienation, as sad art students sometimes believe, but for damn sure included it. A