OSCILLATIONS: NOCTURNAL KOREANS by Wire

Wire’s NOCTURNAL KOREANS is an 8 song mini LP that includes tracks that didn’t fit on their eponymous 2015 release.  Amazingly,  it’s the mercurial group’s 15th album since the punk/pop classic PINK FLAG (1977). Most bands who’ve been around in various guises for forty years would sound both staid and safe, but Wire have managed to keep a delicate balance between pop impulses,  exploratory art concepts, and explosive punk diatribes. In many ways, NOCTURNAL KOREANS most closely resembles their most successfully experimental album,  154 (1979) in its transient grasps at exorcizing paranoia, presenting random observations as bits of absurdist slight of hand, and embracing dead of night stillness. Both Colin Newman and Graham Lewis have every reason to be proud of these so-called  scraps.