Following after three increasingly inventive, truly unique singles ("Summer's Last Sound," "From the Devil to the Deep Blue Sea," "The Last Dance") that demonstrated how thoroughly the band embraced the sampling aesthetic to create a distinct kind of modern art rock, Go Pop embraced the irony of its title with a passion. Pop hooks existed on the record, but only in the most spare, hard-to-find of forms; otherwise, Disco Inferno was out to create an album to challenge as many listeners as possible without fully embracing a noise approach. In its tension between accessibility and extreme experimentation, Go Pop resembles no other album so much as Wire's 154 for the modern day -- very English, encompassing a variety of styles and approaches, seemingly totally cryptic yet more touching to the mind, body and soul than anyone might have expected. "In Sharky Water" begins things with water sounds, a basic bass, and a drum slow pulse before turning into an overtly studio-produced thrash combined with shouted lyrics. Every song takes on a different tack, all clearly by the same band while remaining distinctly unique. "New Clothes for the New World" wraps distorted, shuddered vocals around equally strange sounding church bell samples, "Even the Sea Sides Against Us" floats on an acoustic guitar bed endlessly looping around a series of wave sounds and odd keyboard touches, and so forth. It ends with a found-sound tape of a landlady berating the band for playing too loud; it's not the noise but the complexity that leaves your mouth open. Probably one of the only bands truly worthy of the term "post-rock," Disco Inferno is heading in a direction that no previous band has fully embraced.
© Ned Raggett /TiVo