The Who – ‘Endless Wire’ (2006)

In the brilliant, circular overture of synthesizer and riff that opens Endless Wire, we find a triumph for what’s left of the Who.

“Fragments,” as a tune, is everything this band should have been doing instead of slowly but surely turning itself into a too-old streetwalker with its faded party hat on crooked. It’s simultaneously familiar, yet utterly new – an echo that doesn’t repeat itself so much as deepen in the cracks that encircle Roger Daltrey’s voice and the slowing of Pete Townshend’s ever-turning windmill into something like a fine wine.



So, they go and mess it up later. OK. For “Fragments,” and maybe even “Fragments” alone, they can be forgiven for continuing past the untimely deaths of the entire rhythm section. But only just.

Not that there aren’t moments on Endless Wire. This album’s “Black Widow’s Eyes” has a kind of broken beauty familiar to anyone with Who’s Next on vinyl. “Two Thousand Years,” with soaring violins and plucky guitar, also blows through like a brisk breeze.

The now-inevitable mini-opera, more than two decades after the last original release from this band, sounds like the thing a Who album ought to have rather than something included as inspiration: Rote, rather than right. Skip right to the remix of “Fragments,” where bits of that remarkable construction from Track 1 are blown apart then put back together again.

It’s a nice metaphor for what’s happened to the Who – and far gutsier than anything else on the second half of the album.

Nick DeRiso

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