A few months ago while I was just about to start work on a post on Wire’s Three Girl Rhumba for my 7×7:77 series, I was contacted by a Washington DC band who’d taken their name from another Wire track, Dot Dash. Well, coincidences happen, don’t they?

The band got in touch again last week, asking me if I would like to share a track from their Half Remembered Dream album on the blog.

The email arrived just as I was thinking of a new post that would include a couple of tracks that hadn’t made my 30 Favourite Tracks of the Year list but which maybe should have.

And the tracks that I’d been thinking of posting?

One I’ll feature in my next post after this; the other, again by coincidence, was Wire’s very fine Re-Invent Your Second Wheel from their tenth album Change Becomes Us.

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With a sonic palette that straddles power-pop, post-punk and indie rock, Half Remembered Dream was one of my favourite albums of 2013, an impressively lean collection of ten immaculately crafted nuggets that seldom nudge past the three minute mark. The album is rich with hooks, punchy riffs, bristling basslines and plaintive melodies and it’s a mystery to me why it didn’t make far more Best of the Year lists.

Here’s Shopworn Excuse available as a free download from Bandcamp.

And this is The Past Is Another Country from their second album, Winter Garden Light, released in 2012 by The Beautiful Music:

 
And finally, some more live Wire from thirty five years ago when they appeared on the long running German TV music show Rockpalast. No, not the track Dot Dash but instead the hypnotic French Film Blurred from 1978’s Chairs Missing: