Mission of Burma / Wire : A Little Bit Of History Repeating

I guess she asked for this.

Marilyn has been asking me to pop in and do a guest spot for A Future In Noise for some time now, and I thought that now would be as good a time as any for it. There's a certain synchronicity to it - Marilyn is back in the states after a nice long layoff of listening to post-whatever and eating terrible beef in the United Kingdom (hey, I'm a vegetarian - and the food was not bad there at all! - Ed.), and my own blog is back after almost a year on the bleachers. After spending the last week checking in on old friends, hacking around the code on my page (Absolute Wordpress Supremacy, by the way), and listening to my "Blogging" playlist for the first time in ages, things started to feel very familiar.

Which was a problem, because this felt very much like a week for familiar things, and none of those familiar feelings were very good ones.

I was just a kid during the Exxon Valdez spill, but the images of fresh faced kids cleaning off oil drenched birds with the voices of somber TV anchormodels in the background come uncomfortably close to the things I'm seeing in Louisiana, and the first hand accounts I get from friends in the area doesn't do much to ward off that eerie deja-vu. American Idol has crowned another increasingly irrelevant winner, whose name I've already forgotten and I don't care to be reminded of, who probably has a gold record and a string of irritating morning radio interviews to look forward to before going into the sweet embrace of complete irrelevance. Paul Grey, the bassist from Slipknot, died of a likely overdose in a saddening flashback to the worst music moments of the 90's. And the 2000's. And last year. And yes, you snarky kids, a human life that recorded Psychosocial is worth exactly as much as a human life that recorded Rooster.

I know that history repeats itself, but the last few weeks have felt more like a record skipping than an album playing on repeat. One of the most depressing things about the news is that nobody seems to learn anything.

Thankfully, music is different. History repeats itself, of course. It only takes a cursory glance at the last century or so of modern music to see how cyclical the public's tastes are. But at the same time, it evolves if it does nothing else. I always love hearing how different cultures, unique life experiences, or a once in a generation creative mind can create a fresh twist on a familiar idea. My playlist landed on Mission of Burma, and I felt another familiar feeling pass over me.

I liked this one.

If you've ever given played "Vs", the band's most famous record, what'll stick out to you the most on first listen is that it's loud. Like, super loud. And their live record, "The Horrible Truth About Burma", only accentuates the super loudness. It's not a shock that Roger Miller had hearing problems after about three years of playing this stuff. The material sounds futuristic for its time - Martin Swope worked with the band as something of a cross between a sound manipulator and a DJ, combining old takes with the live product in ways the rest of the group could never quite predict and giving each gig an element of surprise.

"Vs." was the follow up to the hugely successful EP “Signals, Calls and Marches”, which had been released the year before. The pressures and hyperbole that come with critics lauding and anticipating your work wasn't new, but the ease with which they handled that pressure is singular - it was a record that launched a thousand bands, even if it didn't receive as much promotion as it could have, thanks to the tinnitus problem that Miller suffered from. Here was a gritty, confrontational record that still knew when to space things out. Even though Miller and bassist Clint Conley split songwriting duties, and their songs certainly had different styles if you looked at the credits, their strength as a band still allowed them to feel cohesive. Tracks like "Mica" and "Train" sound great, and you can tell that groups like Pearl Jam and Jawbox had them in mind as they wrote their early records. And unlike many albums that fizzle out after the A-side, Burma was determined to finish strong. Harsh tracks like "Johnny Burma", and weird trippy numbers like "Fun World" throw you so off guard that when you get to "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate", which is probably the most famous track here, you're almost glad for the familiarity.

The band was disintegrated in 1983 a year after the release of “Vs.” due to Miller's worsening physical condition. They all then went on to do different projects in different sectors of the music world. Peter Prescott, the group's drummer, formed another band in Boston known as the Volcano Suns. Later, he formed The Peer Group and Kustomized. Clint Conley became a producer and instrumental in producing records for musicians like Yo La Tengo. He later became a TV producer. Miller and manipulator Martin Swope became part of the “Birds of the Mesozoic” until the early 90s.

What's interesting about Mission of Burma isn't just the unlikely success of their reunion (ONoffON and The Obliterati is as good as if not better than their 80's material), but their resonance. Sure, you can hear bits of Burma's structure in later records like Fugazi's "In On the Kill Taker", but you can also hear their roots, gnarled and twisted though they may be, in stuff like Pere Ubu's "Dub Housing" and Wire's "Chairs Missing".

Like Pere Ubu, everything in Wire's catalog is good, but Chairs Missing is their most cohesive record, and probably the best choice if you were, say, a bored guy or girl on the Internet looking for something fresh to listen to. Like Mission of Burma, Wire's previous record had set a high bar. "Pink Flag" was a coarse record that set fans and reviewers on their ears. Wire certainly didn't shy away from straight forward rock on their follow-up (as evidenced by the hypnotic stomp of album opener "Practice Makes Perfect"), but it quickly becomes apparent that Wire are setting out to shake free of minute and a half sprints and reach for the stars on their own merits.

Wire cannily used a synth (anathema to punk bands at the time) to space their songs out and provide texture, and Colin Newman's lyrics keep with the band's tradition of walking the wire between sticking inside of a genre and mocking it (take, for example, the semi-seriousness of "French Film (Blurred)". It's almost odd to think that I'm the first person on AFIN to devote a review to this group, because Wire was in someways the definitive post-punk band - maybe not as notorious as some of the others, but certainly one of the first to the party. And it helps to think of this record as a rough forebearer to stuff that would come after it. Most of the record is moody and atmospheric, a good deal quieter than stuff like the Replacements that would mine the same territory later on. But the rougher moments should strike chords with experienced music fans (who hears the intro to "I Am The Fly" and doesn't think of The Pixies the first time?).

Chairs Missing is a great record with great imagery that doesn't have the repetition of Pink Flag's shorter tracks or the filler that permeated 154. And it jumps out as a good compliment to Vs. because, musical similarities aside, both groups seem driven by awareness of their own place in the music world, and their insistence on getting out from under it and transitioning to something new. Their styles might have drawn snorts from their contemporaries, but the material from both groups still sounds fresh and vital, while their contemporaries sound like... well... loud music made in the 80s. Play them together. You might get a weird familiar feeling you'll want to experience again and again.

Lest I forget : you can see more of my brilliant, amazing, amazingly brilliant work at Stereo Zeitgeist.