Minimalist punk strikes a chord

The prototypical punk bank worked with three chords, but Wire dispensed with two of them.

Stripped down to the point where marginal instrumental skill and conceptual art converged, their first album, Pink Flag, cast a chill on Sex Pistols fans in late 1977, replacing spittle-flecked fury with frosty disdain.

Wire's music grew more layered and less organic on subsequent albums, and the band members drifted apart during the 1990s. But they reemerged at the turn of the millennium, newly dedicated to guitar-based minimalism.

"Our Time," which opened the band's show Friday night at Johnny Brenda's, is based around a single, driving chord, which singer Colin Newman embellished with a guitar solo consisting of exactly two notes.

Wire's determination not to revisit early material was once so steadfast that the members brought a tribute band on tour to head off requests. That stance has softened (the set included four songs from Pink Flag alone), but woe to the fans who think they can alter the band's set list.

Bassist Graham Lewis, whose tight black shirt showed off an imposingly muscled torso, quashed a fan's persistent request with an obscene variation on "Excuse me."

"I judge that was a fair substitute," he drawled after finishing "The 15th."

Object 47, Wire's first album in five years, is the band's first without guitarist Bruce Gilbert, and it lacks some of its predecessor's punch. But Gilbert's absence was more than compensated for by Margaret Fiedler McGinnis, who added subtle coloration and raw power to the band's attack.

On "Silk Skin Paws," a Lewis composition about bankers jumping to their deaths, her crisp downward strokes suggested the tolling of church bells, or the thwack of bodies hitting the pavement. The song's attack on the financial wizards behind the 1987 stock market crash needed little updating to fit current events. Quipped Lewis: "It feels nostalgic."

Anchored by Robert Grey's precise, skeletal drumming, songs like "Comet" hurtled ahead at breakneck pace before slamming into a brick wall, cutting off as abruptly as they began.

In their focus and aggression, Wire's early songs prefigured American hard core, but their anger is abstracted, not visceral, which relieves the band of the obligation to act out a 20-year-old's rage with a 50-year-old's body.

Still searching for relief, the members flail away at that single chord, waiting for the world to change keys.