What does it mean when a band reforms 20 years after their heyday and fits right in with this year’s models?
If a resurgence of interest in vintage post-punk (Pere Ubu, Gang Of Four, Wire) and early ’80s industrial grey matters prepared the road for Franz Ferdinand, The Rapture, Interpol et al, then the return of Boston trio Mission Of Burma puts things in further perspective. Like The Feelies, MOB were a band that eked a bare living out of the US club scene in the early 80s, adored by their juniors (Sonic Youth, REM, Moby), ignored by the masses. After one gem of an album (Vs, 1982) they split, citing tinnitus. In the interim the best chance you had of hearing their stuff was on the tape deck in the touring van of Amerindie-phile travelling bands. Now, following a lauding in Michael Azzerad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life, they’ve come back to claim their autumn inheritances.
The good news is, they haven’t come empty-handed. From the get go (a cluster of hot-barrelled machine-gun tunes by the names of ‘The Setup’, ‘Hunt Again’ and ‘The Enthusiast’) they barely sound a day older. The ire is still in their bellies, the chops are hot, and the rhythm section of Clint Conley and Peter Prescott are all lubed up. The gang-handed vocals are unglamorous but Husker-gutsy, guitarist Roger Miller is a wizard at sound manipulation and effects invention, and the tunes are taut and Wire-y underneath, topped with a dream-dissonant haze halfway between The Sonics and the Youth. But they do diversity too. Strip away the guitar fireworks and trap kit skittering of ‘Fever Moon’ and you excavate traces of old English folk song. ‘Nicotine Bomb’ is renegade cow-punk. ‘Max Ernst’s Dream’ is a Daydream Nation wall of sound: noise as art, the art of noise. And Bob Weston has recorded the whole thing without so much as a modish effect or ounce of production flab.
ONoffON is way too dense and lengthy to digest in even a week’s listening (and they know it: the sleeve proclaims, “Burma encourages shuffleplay”), but MOB have been bottling all this stuff up for two decades. The live show should be intensity squared.