The Who: Endless Wire

CML call number: CD ROCK Who
Alan Light wrote in the New York Times: "A sprawling work, it ranges from the first songs [Pete] Townshend and [Roger] Daltrey have ever recorded as an acoustic duo to some that hold their own next to the band's finest stadium rockers. At its heart is 'Wire & Glass,' a 10-song 'mini-opera' that is Mr. Townshend's latest foray into extended musical narrative, an approach he pioneered with the rock operas 'Tommy' and 'Quadrophenia.' 'The stripped-down acoustic-vocal stuff is what slays me,' Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam's lead singer and a longtime champion of the older band, wrote. … Mr. Daltrey, 62, and Mr. Townshend, 61, are the two surviving members of the founding lineup, after the deaths of their incendiary drummer, Keith Moon, in 1978 and [bassist] John Entwistle in 2002. … 'The Boy Who Heard Music' (posted at www.petetownshend.co.uk/projects/tbwhm) is a tightly knit, hallucinatory tale of the rise and fall of a band made up of three teenagers from different ethnic groups, and an aging rock star observing them from a mental institution. … [Townshend] reworked the novella into 'Wire and Glass' — some songs that 'had some teeth.' …"