Mission Of Burma

It all begins when Roger Miller, guitar, and Clint Conley, bass, meet in the mid-70s in Boston, and start playing under the name Moving Parts, perhaps in memory of this very beginning: "moving parts" that migrated to the same place at the same time and gave rise to something fundamental.

And that something is soon to be called Mission Of Burma. Conley and Miller first recruit a drummer, the immensely skilled Peter Prescott, and by the end of the decade they're doing the rounds of Boston's alternative underground circuit. Their early hardcore fusions are already anomalous, but that wasn't enough: what was missing was electronics, to make this alien blend of power-pop, acid-rock and, of course, the most frenzied punk-rock even more effective, and if anything more erudite.

It was thus Martin Swope, already a student of serialism and avant-garde music, who injected new blood into their early recordings, still stylistically hesitant ("Academy Fight Song", "Ok No Way", "Forget", "Peking Spring" and above all "Laugh the World Away", all between 1979 and 1980) about new doses of chaos and electronic fragmentation. The masterstroke comes with the magnificent EP "Signal Calls & Marches" (Ace Of Hearts, 1981), featuring the thunderous, anti-heroic "That's When I Reach for My Revolver", their supreme anthem, and a whole series of inventions (chief among them the tribal-guitar magma of "All World Cowboy Romance") mapping out an incredibly vast spectrum for a punk band.

As revolutionary as the scope of this first work sounded, it's not comparable to their first full-length, "Vs". Here all the band's impulses meet, clash and dissolve together; traditional hardcore punk is shattered and regenerated moment by moment, while melody — never forgotten and at times even more prominent — floats among the wandering harmonic wreckage. Every single detail of "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" becomes an elaborate development, a dramatic, even tragic occasion.

The opening of "Secrets" is spectacular, a sprint detonated by tremolo-reverbed guitar, angular dissonant bass and the chaos of reprocessed tape overdubs, over which the vocals settle in with imploded desperation (sealed by chaotic backing vocals too) — a fabulous prelude jam that would make Husker Du fall in love, and one of the finest openings in all of punk-rock.

"Trem Two" also kicks off with guitar echoes, but this time the band heads toward a raga with low voices, seemingly even seeking a Tibetan-mantra kind of ecstasy, while at the same time building tension through arcane elements, both harmonic and percussive, something descended from new wave in a Feelies vein.

One of the most free-form tracks, indeed one with a truly instinctive unfolding, is "Learn How", with relentless, unresting cross-rhythms, the guitar shifting from a steady riff to a noise-rock wail, the bass moving from machine-gun bursts to alienated sobbing, and above all the infernal theatrics of the two men's ragged voices.

A true hymn to chaos is "New Nails", all industrial bleeps, schizoid vocals, free-jazz trumpeting, electronic deformations, manic tempo, and screamed sing-alongs — one of the most unsettling rackets of the era. The same goes for "Fun World", another even more exasperated, whirling Pere Ubu-esque dance, set between a bass churning out no-wave-derived anti-funk undercurrents and a guitar caught in a formidable anti-solo of feedback and distortion. The skeletal "Weatherbox", another modern dance, brings the unidentifiable sonorities even further to the surface, here performing a true dissonant kaleidoscope. Once again, the usual maniacal dose of cold hell and chaotic unpredictability gives real meaning to "Mica", which incidentally opens with an absorbed guitar that suddenly catapults into a nihilistic psychodrama.

"Dead Pool" and "Einstein's Day", on the other hand, ease off the frenzied pace, generating an equally disorienting contrast. The former becomes a solemn, almost transcendental meditation (and toward the end adds Swope's electronics to heighten the supreme trance), while the latter deepens that ecstatic calm and stands out fascinatingly amid the racket of the rest: guitar and bass, pitched very high, cradle the restrained vocal; the harmonic fractures, slowed down here, clearly anticipate post-rock.

The melodic side comes through above all in "Train", a proto emo-core riff immediately shredded by the rhythm section, with a poetic, oracle-like vocal that then turns into a shrieked chant amid the detonations. The power the band builds up is devastating, capable of destroying harmony down to its very foundations, as if the four of them had planted sticks of dynamite every few chords. And the light-speed power-pop march of "The Ballad of Johnny Burma" effectively invents pop-core (even though it's already blown to pieces and thus rendered "post-" by its own inventors).

The vibrant anthem of "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" then makes clear where Mission Of Burma started out ("That's When I Reach for My Revolver") and how they manage to bring the circle perfectly full after so much deconstruction.

One, none and a hundred thousand are the lessons of Mission Of Burma. First and foremost, it's a record of perfectly relentless arrangements built from the most total absence of arrangement. But that's just the foundation. There's a string of intense moments that feels modern and, in some ways, unmatched. Above all, there are astonishingly avant-garde solutions for a rock album, bordering on or bordering right into alienating chaos, pushing the whole of new wave (not just punk) toward an even more aloof and detached dimension, turning the riotous energy of the Sex Pistols into a form of intellectualism rooted in knowledge — cold and inward-looking, cryptic yet dense with dynamism, furious and placid at once. The fury of rebellion becomes the ecstasy of nihilism. This was already their swan song: in 1982 the band split up and moved on to solo projects, all of a high standard (the splendid Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic being reason enough), releasing — scattered across live albums and anthologies through to the late '80s — the unreleased material that was meant to form the follow-up. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree: the reunion of the early 2000s brought back the uncompromising nature of the core trio (Bob Weston replacing Swope on electronics) with knowing explorations of their own legacy, from "OnOffOn" to the recent "Unsound" (2012). Reissued in 1997 (Rykodisc) and 2008 (Matador) with a few bonus tracks.

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28/04/2013