Perhaps I am just not in the mood. perhaps it is just too familiar to me. Perhaps it is familiar because the Wire taught me it twenty years ago. But god this is drab. Herrington muses in his editorial about whether we really need genre labels, mentioning that the front cover blurb ("put there to give an indication of what a reader might find when they open us up") recently relabeled "post-rock" and "drum and bass" as "avant rock" and "breakbeat". He justifies the former but doesn't really bother with the latter. And that seems to sum up the Wire of this period. Its business is guitars. Nick Cave on the cover, Invisible Jukebox with Kevin Shields, lead letter about Lester Bangs, feature telling you how to get into Ornette Coleman (surely Wire readers won't be into him already). Global Ear in SF tells us nothing about the contemporary scene, it's just Edwin Pouncey cry-wanking over the past. Joe Morris is free jazz, but a free jazz guitarist. There's a feature on Maryanne Amacher written by "guitarist Alan Licht". Even Fennesz is presented as an ex-guitarist. If you want a blurb for your front cover, maybe go with "Q For People Worried They're Getting Old." There's a review of the new John Barry biography! Rob Young's piece on just intonation drops all the right names but is badly confused, Pan Sonic look like a pair of very old men, and This Heat get in via the Corrections section (and it's such an egregious error I can only think they made it deliberately so they could keep up their This Heat quota (David Sylvian is there, too, don't worry, among the reviews)). A letter complains that if Jim O'Rourke doesn't care about good technique, "why not stop making music altogether and let others do so? They most likely would be more successful than him." You'd think it was clickbait if anyone was baiting clicks in 1999. Also Martin Archer losing his patience over misidentification of a baritone sax in Walk on the Wild Side. Other pages exist, but the Wire's direction is summed up by the back cover advert: earlier issues have booze; later ones have Soul Jazz; this one has Peter Gabriel's Real World Records. ( )