Although he doesn't cop to it on the accompanying literature for Bastard, Colin Newman's seventh record since the dissolution of Wire is heavily influenced by contemporary pioneers of trance/dance like Orb and Aphex Twin. But Newman goes at it in a brash, singular and typically erudite fashion: After recording several of Bastard's tracks with his vocals—Newman was Wire's primary singer—he made a conscious decision to remove them. As such, the record shows a less obvious personality than his sung material. But there's still a sense of humor: Newman's take on drum 'n' bass, the skittish "Slowfast (Falling Down The Stairs With A Drum Kit)," is so dizzyingly fast it'd be virtually impossible to dance to. Other tracks, especially "Sticky" and "Spaced-In," vibrate with an almost robotic funkiness. Unlike late-period Wire (or Wir, as it were), Bastard's grooves are not coldly antiseptic and numbly detached; a thick mix of insistent guitar and pointedly plucked electric bass on "May," and the spiraling "Spiked," show Newman's musical ideas to be as flexibly coherent as ever. Through his Swim~ label, Newman has been releasing an interesting slew of esoteric and ambient music in various permutations—usually electronic. But this time, he seems to have purged much of those minimalist/house elements, and has wisely avoided saddling these songs with too much technology. Bastard represents his first rock-oriented material in a long time, and while Newman claims to have been interested in (and unsatisfied by) recent similarly inclined music, his album ends up owing nothing to anything but itself. It's an impressively visionary, futuristic record from a musician who's still important.