Kevin Bronson on April 3rd, 2017

0

Wire, 40 years young, wound up the three-night DRILL Festival in muscular fashion on Saturday night at the Echoplex, cementing their legacy as a band that gets the maximum out of its minimalism and finds ways to stay relevant where most of their vintage settle for nostalgia. Their headlining set, which came on the 40th anniversary of what the band considers its first show, ended with a wall of noise when a flock of guitarists joined the U.K. quartet onstage for a session of the Pinkflag Guitar Orchestra. Before, Wire had crackled through an 18-song set — seven from their new album “Silver/Lead,” their 15th, which came out Friday. The new material hardly sounded dated next to songs like 1977’s “Three Girl Rhumba.” The foursome — Colin Newman, Matt Simms, Graham Lewis and Robert Grey — also dipped deep into the catalog for gems like “Art of Persistence,” from the 2000 EP “Third Day.”

The fare at the final night of DRILL also spanned the far corners of the sonic spectrum — the pugilistic industrial rock of the duo Youth Code (displaying a banner honoring the memory of the late Cash Askew, who played in the Bay Area band Them Are Us Too and died in the Ghost Ship fire), the astral piano songs of Julia Holter and the ’70s-inspired trippiness of Mild High Club.

Photos by Carl Pocket, courtesy of the Echo