A stylistic continuation of the artful pop of 1987’s The Ideal Copy, and an album that has unexpectedly become the standard-bearer prototype for Wire’s post-Send output, A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck is the band at their most streamlined and polished. For those who valued their minute-long fuzz outbursts on debut album Pink Flag, this might not necessarily be something to celebrate; of all the reasons to praise Wire during their most creative period (1977-1979), sounding accessibly glossy wasn’t necessarily one of them.

This isn’t necessarily a knock on A Bell Is A Cup. It is, perhaps, a bit too slickly produced to fully reveal the depth within its songs so readily, but they’re there to be discovered, largely in the form of Colin Newman’s lyrical approach. He’s always been adept at wordplay and playful abstractions, but here they take on greater detail and poignancy. In “A Public Place,” Newman observes pigeons scavenging in vomit: “The contents of a man’s life/ In this public place/ His last mortal remains reflect a private lake.” He takes a more rhythmic tone on “The Queen Of Ur And The King Of Um,” commenting on “A babbling gaggle, a scrabbling rabble.” And “Kidney Bingos” is sort of the band’s own hyper-intellectual Bizarro World “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” as Newman runs down a laundry list of items clipped from tabloid newspapers: “Dressed pints/ Demon shrinks/ bread dunk/ dead drinks/ Stretch clubs/ models box/ draw skin/ black shocks.” 

For all of the captivating lyrical nuggets on A Bell Is A Cup, it is a bit straightforward musically, shedding much of their earlier experiments for a perfectly pleasant ’80s art-pop sound. And when it’s good, it’s outstanding, as on the darkly seductive opener, “Silk Skin Paws,” which juxtaposes one distorted riff with a lighter jangle. And “Come Back In Two Halves” is the closest thing here to a proper punk song, which is to say not that close, actually. The only real disappointment is in knowing that — as impressive as Wire’s pop songs are — their more dissonant post-punk experiments a decade earlier were better.