In 1986, Wire’s bass player Lewis released his first solo record Hail under the alias He Said. Featuring Bruce Gilbert and Brian Eno, it should have been hailed as the great work it was, but it turned out to be an inauspicious start given that it was overshadowed by his return to Wire after nearly six years of inactivity. Much of what Edvard Graham Lewis has done since then under various guises has remained just under the radar, but he has persisted in spite of that early indifference. And it’s a good job for us that he has because Alreet? might well be his late period masterpiece, with ne’er a weak moment.
The flippant title – a warm greeting from the North East – belies the considerable achievement here. Under that Scandified moniker of his full name (Edward becomes Edvard), Lewis has released three albums, two of which came out accompanying one another in 2014: the largely ambient noise-driven All Under and the more song-driven All Over, though both were prone to shoot off on unexpected tangents. Alreet? consolidates both and adds another decade of experience to the pot. At seventy-one, Lewis’s voice has deepened into an authoritative but still vulnerable baritone, resonating like a latter-period Johnny Cash. The open lines of ‘Kinds of Whether’ (“you’ll not pass this way again / I’ll never have the pleasure / you’ll not pass this way again / in search of sonic treasure”) certainly suggesting finality, though it’s valedictory too, with a pulsing undercurrent that implores us to keep moving, irrespective of this combative opening salvo.
Elsewhere there are more songs of experience, although hopefully with some artistic licence: ‘Last Scene Of All’ seems to depict the losing of one’s facilities with help from William Shakespeare, while ‘Bang!’ is a spoken word track that deals with living with pain, with a final act of release, a cantering towards the light. And there’s unexpected tenderness with ‘Switch’ too – in the way that ‘Bill Is Dead’ by The Fall was unexpected and tender – where Lewis delivers an unabashed love song that feels devoid of any irony (“You caught my eye / you pulled me close / my guard it fell / and I was toast”). The flipside of the record opens with the epic sounding ‘I Still Remember’, as Lewis sings about the fabric of time being ripped apart by a smoking gun, and then there’s some of the experimental edge of last year’s Lewis Spybey collaboration with Zoviet France’s Mark Spybey on the elliptical ‘Key Weapon’.
There’s been plenty going on in the intervening thirty-nine years between Alreet? and Hail, whether it’s Dome with Gilbert, Duet Emmo with Mute’s Daniel Miller, collaborations with John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff, or the 2017 ambient noise supergroup UUUU containing Thighpaulsandra, Wire’s Matthew Simms and fêted percussionist Valentina Magaletti. It’s an impressively diverse body of work he’s presided over, which intersects with the extracurriculars of other members of Wire, a giant patchwork that absorbs a multitude of collaborators and even challenges that band’s pre-eminence in my not so humble opinion. Here Max Lorentz, whose most eye-catching previous collaboration is Agnetha Fältskog, contributes to the record, as do Wire casualties who aren’t Colin Newman, though ‘Alreet?’ feels as raw and as singular as any record Lewis has previously made. And it might be one of his best too, which I appreciate is a bold claim.
