#50 Wire – Chairs Missing
Wire’s “Pink Flag” is a great album, one of the best punk albums to come out during the 70s without a doubt. However, to take an album like Pink Flag and then follow it up with “Chairs Missing” takes skill. Punk always had a feel of trying to destroying the Progressive Rock bands from the era and what Wire ends up doing is creating a Progressive Punk album that feels both like a follow-up to “Pink Flag” as well as an ode to Brian Eno.
Chairs Missing often feels like a journey rather than a declaration. The album often challenged by early impressions of punk which was often a deconstruction of rock and roll and then reconstructing it back up into a stylish punk. In my honest opinion, this is why this album is head and toes better than Pink Flag and many other Punk records in that they understood the limitations of punk and chose an avenue to explore.
Whether you call them art-punk or post-punk they were definitely influential and that list of bands is continually growing (Sonic Youth, R.E.M., The Cure, Guided By Voices, Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine .etc), for starters. While always being a critics favorite, they have never received the popular reception that they were due.