Inside The Noise Floor: Wire Doll — Active Directive (VVR015)
Melbourne’s Wire Doll have dropped their debut EP, jolting the airwaves with swagger, brainiac concepts, and punk rock venom.
On the western fringe of the Melbourne metropolitan area lies a regrettable suburb named Deer Park. This cookie-cutter wasteland is home to the largest remand centre in Australia, conscious unemployment, and industrial seepage. Disillusionment, particularly amongst the youth, is understandable, with little opportunity and a culture steeped in dole queues and king hits. But from manure a flower grows, and as is so often the case, adversity breeds brilliance. Wire Doll: horseshit’s latest blossom.
Wire Doll (Daisy Massobianco, Dan Stevens and Jack Coco) have known each other since kindergarten. Barely out of their teens, the trio became close friends in high school upon discovering their mutual lust for fellow Aussie punksters Amyl and the Sniffers and The Chats.
“I was a loner at school. I mostly sat by myself reading. One lunchtime, Dan and Jack sat next to me blasting this wacko noise out of Jack’s phone. I’d never heard this type of music before. Three years later I’m screaming in a punk band.”
Active Directive hits hard. The young band’s debut runs on tight mechanics and lockstep discipline, brimming with old chops and new nerve. Thirteen minutes of incendiary material, played with the confidence of youth who already trust their own instincts.
Beneath the discipline, Wire Doll operates on an unfettered axis of intention — to entertain. Daisy’s whimsy is the lure, ad-libbing oddball intros and outros at will, flipping from sweet to feral in heartbeats. Her scream is both punctuation and puncture, measured for impact, never overdone, and with a savagery belted from the gut, extended from the heart. Refer to track 5 Axis for verification. Lyrically, the singer’s cadence splits the difference between quirk and precision, firing off clever phrasings at will, with a keen sense of timing.
And then there’s Dan and Jack, two young men steeped in punk knowhow, snapping angles around Daisy’s bass-led structure, keeping the frame rigid and sharp, straight out of the post-punk playbook. It’s no surprise to learn that both speak of bands like Wire, Minor Threat, and Crass in reverence, while treating the more contemporary Aussie acts Eddy Current Supression Ring and The Peep Tempel as gods.
“My mum had this wild taste in music ranging from punk to classical. Jack would come over and we’d trash her old CDs, learning so much from them. I only picked up the guitar because of Bernard Sumner (Joy Division) and Andy Gill (Gang Of Four)”
What appears the obvious theme of Active Directive — cold speech, pressure, redaction — is an illusion, and is destroyed and rebuilt throughout. It’s no coincidence that the stripped and chorus-less tracks 1 & 2 (Active Directive; Null) and tracks 4 & 5 (Anatomy Inventory; Axis) are separated by the melodic Lithics (3) and the left turn of Cold Civil (6).
Active Directive opens already in motion causing the listener to think they’ve missed the start. This is deliberate, and is but one pulled out of the bag of art/punk trickery. Screws tighten from the get-go, emotion filtered to pass inspection, nothing more. As the title suggests, this track feels more like an order than a song, issuing fragments of command to the backbeat of overtrained militance. Last line drops “Directive remains active” — a status update in the heat of battle.
No time to reflect now because Null has landed and taken off again, showing off a closed-door economy with no patience for stragglers. Then the old bait and switch, the classic double shuffle from trick bag number two — enter the pause, the key change, the rollicking bass and uh-oh, punk people know where this is going. The explosion into the second half of Null gives me a little stiffy. Heroin for the ears. Thirty-five seconds of excruciating tension, and splash, the frenetic release is palpable. This is what mosh pits were made for.
Lithics is the first point of safety, and swings the lens outward. Dan’s melodic, flange-heavy intro signifies a breather, as the track ascends into anthem territory, and the verse/chorus/verse/bridge/chorus structure appears for the first time. It’s a playful loll from Daisy here, as she riffs on lost histories and empiric lies, reeling off archeological findings and building materials, teasing her audience to an ecstatic chorus that’s certain to be a festival favorite.
The diligent Anatomy Inventory snaps the listener back as a Massobianco body scan commences, turning the human frame into a checklist apt for mindfulness meditation, and the militance returns:
Skull intact identified
Mandible removed labelled
Teeth thirty two classified
Eye cavities empty certified
Spinal length reduced recorded
Rib count confirmed archived
Sternum fractured documented
Pelvis intact quarantined
I mean this is clever shit. What the hell is a mandible?
Track 5 Axis follows, and it’s here where the band shows their theatrical prowess. This is somewhat of an autistic love song with Daisy going sultry as she reflects on the mechanics of romance, brooding in the volume drops, breathtakingly screaming in the tempo switch. Dan and Jack navigate this with cocksure strut, using this trickery to highlight the spaces between the notes, leaving the pattern ringing long after it’s finished.
Cold Civil is the most political track, the album closer revealing itself as safety point number two, allowing the listener a modicum of pop-punk sensibility despite its ominous lyrics. The song deals in block-by-block reality: “trading food for parts, public smiles going home to jagged hearts, reform, erase, repair, wipe off the map.” Fuck the system Wire Doll-style. This is by far the cleanest track on Active Directive, showing off the band’s ability to rock out with their cocks out.
A rambunctious hi-de-hi-de-o ad-lib closes out the album.
What’s impressive here is the balance. Active Directive is lean, but deep. Songs are short, but finished. Hooks placate without filing the edges. They bring the discipline, but treat imperfection as an ally. The flaws work, and Wire Doll knows it.
That combination is rare at any age.
v. vein radioCheck Out These V. Vein Records
© V. Vein Press
