154

"A hieroglyphic album for the lost."

Distance is a hell of a feeling. Turmoil to see what it was hidden from you can invade the body when you are curious enough to explore the parts of your own distorted mind. And when I go back to the city where I was born, I can't help but notice it's a labyrinth of bad and good choices to take and change your life.

Wire's masterpiece, 154, is a puzzling album. A truly complicated one to see. Each direction it takes is a mental pirouette of strange tempos, conflicting droning synths and dark soundscapes that are, just there, chilling. 154 is a liminal space of sounds that embodies the lonely spaces of physical dissonance: to not fit in the place because this feels like another reality. And when you are an avid lucid dreamer, the sole fact you can recognize places of your dreams should be... worrying. But it can also be a signal of something approaching the next stupid choice that will make you descent.

Something in those tracks scratch the weirdest memories; those ones that are so blurred into cognitive confusion you cannot understand as a trauma nor a happy moment. It's like a glitch in the space. Have you heard about the censored stars in Google Sky? Imagine that, but transformed into a 44 minute long time capsule where you can see your oddest fantasies about to save the world... or die in a complex impossible illusion. "Single K.O." might be one of the darkest parts of the record as it grows into this descending mix of sounds, ready to hug you and drug you to death.

I can't stop talk about the most ambitious part of the entire record: A Touching Display. It feels so odd, so familiar, so unknown and so broken. It's a mezmerizing static of distorted guitars haunting the ambient of death and paranoia, as a machine of discomfort and threatening voids. The final seconds reflect something bigger than human alienation; it's the wreck of the consciousness and the disposition of the mental madness. But not every track here reflects oddness. I mean, Map Ref is there, quirky and groovy, and with a Kosminsche rhythmic section that generates the eels in my head.

The highlights of the album are the darkest places, where there is no light, but the darkness feels so comforting, vulnerable but safe, and echoing in a limbo state. "I Should Have Known Better" is a fucking weird choice for an opener, but it perfectly sets the tone for the records main space: a machine that pleads to bleed and live. There can't be humans operating the suffering of a record through sounds, but the cold synths trap the instruments in the eternal loop of confusion to mezmerize.

154 is meant to be apocalyptic and dense. The album reflects the most confusing parts of our brain; the complex corners of blank buildings where you can lose yourself, explore and dream, imagine, or feel defeat. It's a crossroad of maximalistic ideas mashed into a playground to feel trapped. It lets you to get out, but it'll take a few seconds to attack like an earworm, wanting you to come back again, and again, and again.

I should take my meds.