I wonder what is about me that I tend like the middle parts of various trilogies, when so many others seem to like the first or last entry most? This is true of both movies and albums, even if I am in the apparent majority who thinks The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the original Star Wars trilogy.
UK art-punk outfit Wire had one of the most astonishing initial three-album runs of any band of any period. Debut Pink Flag is the one that most closely hews to the aesthetics of punk at the time, tearing through 21 tracks on only a single slab of wax. Third album 154 (named for the number of shows they had performed up to that point) is at the other end of an extreme, being art-rock with a capital “A”. Chairs Missing is the middle child, and it somehow evenly splits the difference between its predecessor and successor. And that is likely a large part of why I love this album as much as I do.
With 15 tracks, it still has some songs with the brevity of those on Pink Flag, while others stretch out, anticipating the sprawling experiments of 154. “Mercy”, which leads off the second side, has one foot in each world, slowly building tension until the midpoint when an explosive transition leads us into a sonically devastating second half.
Not that they don’t know their way around a pop song. My favorite song of theirs is “Outdoor Miner”, an incredibly catchy tune about a silverfish, of all things. An aspect I find interesting about this track is it is significantly longer in its single incarnation than the album version, and both have their merits.
That is immediately followed by another single from the album, “I Am The Fly”. Something intriguing about this song is the earworm of a chorus repeats that title until it starts getting a bit irritating, which would seem to be the intention.
Like the effect that chorus has on the listener, the general vibe of this album is one of unease. An apparently angry child’s doll provides the point of view in “From The Nursery”: “Would you like to see what violence these can send to your heart from the nursery?” The narrator of opener “Practice Makes Perfect” invites a potential lover upstairs where he has in the bedroom “Sarah Bernhardt’s hand”. I don’t know what that means, but the eerie music suggests it isn’t something good.
There’s more variety in these tracks than what was on Pink Flag. “Practice Makes Perfect” is, surprisingly, a foxtrot. “Men 2nd” has a curious galloping rhythm. Closer “Too Late” becomes a wall of distorted sounds that seems to foretell My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. The final minute or so recalls the loops used in that album’s “Loomer”.
Other tracks paint more open sonic expanses than we had come to expect from their debut. “Marooned” is a perfect marriage of lyrics and music, as an airy and sparse arrangement accompanies an allegory of a man on a shrinking iceberg. That he is accelerating that with flaming petrol doesn’t sound ideal, and this feels like a metaphor for climate change, regardless of the author’s original intentions. “Heartbeat” is about focusing on the rhythm of one’s own heart and the music bed conveys this perfectly. “Being Sucked In Again” feels like we are alone in a perfect still body of water until the fin of a shark slides up and cleanly slices through that surface.
My introduction to this album was on a CD borrowed from a public library. First, that such a place led me to find such a work is why I will forever support that institution. Second, listening on vinyl always seems odd to me, as “Mercy” feels like the culmination of spacious tracks that had been building tension across a sequence, only it doesn’t end the first side as I would have anticipated.
One last thing I love about Chairs Missing, and the albums that bookended it, are what I perceive to be a progression of images in the cover art. Pink Flag has the titular item flying atop a pole dead center in the middle, with only a deeply artificial blue sky in the background. We see a similar sky between curtains on the cover of the next album, where the only other ornamentation is a table draped in white cloth and a flower in a vase sitting atop it. Then 154 is extremely abstract, though with the same colors used on the covers of the previous two albums. I like to think we have pulled back even further and into somebody’s mind where all is not well. After all, the title of Chairs Missing is slang for insanity or idiocy, being a shortened way of saying somebody is like a table with chairs missing–that they’re not all there.