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Classic Rock MagazineJun 21, 2013This is the best Wire album of this century. [May 2013, p.84]
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Jun 4, 2013Change Becomes Us sounds almost like a lost fourth Harvest release.
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May 2, 2013Because they write interesting but still enjoyable songs, as they do consistently on Change Becomes Us, they make their music worth coming back to again and again.
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The WireApr 24, 2013When dealing with the more fully formed of the original songs, the album is extremely strong. [Apr 2013, p.58]
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Apr 23, 2013Some of their ‘80s-style material also works in a pretty way (“Re-invent Your Second Wheel,” “BW Silence,” “Time Lock Fog”), but not so that you’re convinced that their collective hearts are in it.
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MagnetApr 16, 2013Newman has pushed his voice to a human place, upon a mantle, as if finally proud of the boys. Good show. [No.97, p.61]
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Q MagazineApr 10, 2013On this career highlight they deliver their memorandum as effectively as at any time in their 30-odd-years of operation. [May 2013, p.113]
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Apr 2, 2013History and transformation are, understandably, recurring themes in the new lyrics on Change Becomes Us, and it's a treat to have this missing link in the Wire story repaired, even if it's as much an anomaly in the present moment as Document and Eyewitness was in its time.
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Mar 28, 2013By tying together new ideas with some old string, Change Becomes Us builds on the band’s iconoclastic tradition, further ensuring that the energy it’s put into producing one of the most challenging, curious, and appealing catalogs in the underground rock cannon hasn’t been for naught.
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Mar 28, 2013The real act of provocation here comes in the streamlining of what had been cacophonous material into a solid bag of actual tunes.
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Mar 28, 2013Change Becomes Us is a veritable compendium of everything that Wire has been up to since the late ‘70s, combining the bristling energy of the good old days, the electronic textures of the ‘80s forays, and the heftier rock of its 2000s output.
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Mar 26, 2013Overall Change lacks Wire’s usual focus.
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Mar 25, 2013Unmistakeably, each track encapsulates the old and new in Wire's musical history.
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Mar 25, 2013In parts, it’s just as absorbing as anything they’ve released.
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Mar 25, 2013Change Becomes Us is more than just a rehash or compare-and-contrast exercise; these songs sound great in their own right.
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Mar 25, 2013Revisiting the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but turning elements from one of their discography’s savage outliers into a competently turned-out, but not outstanding new chapter in the ongoing story of Wire hardly seems like the most ambitious thing they could have done with that material.
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Under The RadarMar 22, 2013Change Becomes Us is an album throbbing with knowingly restrained anger, but with enough breathing space for it to be thoroughly enjoyed. [Mar-Apr 2013, p.97]
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UncutMar 21, 2013New guitarist Matthew Simms has refreshed Wire's sound. [Apr 2013, p.79]
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Mar 21, 2013Despite the songs' far-off beginnings, Change Becomes Us is like an aggressive, steroid-pumped continuation of the band's excellent 2011 album Red Barked Tree, a testament to the band's consistent faithfulness to the key signatures of ice-sheet psychedelia and jackhammer punk.
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Alternative PressMar 21, 2013They continue to exercise more craft i their work than newbies a third of their age. [Apr 2013, p.94]
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Mar 21, 2013Despite many excellent tunes, a continual emphasis on effects makes the album slightly grating in parts, feeling a bit like a Wire and Frampton Come Alive! recurring super group nightmare, in which the best and worst aspects of Seventies rock music are forced to combine to beat the Russians.
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MojoMar 21, 2013They are a fuller-sounding group in 2013. [Apr 2013, p.91]