Guitar colossus: a Boston band blazes trails in post-punk, noise rock and post-hardcore.
I’ve seen stirrings of a CD revival, and while I’ve never fetishized any particular format, the experience of obtaining music as a physical object was once such an exciting experience in many of our young lives, it is sad many will never experience it. In my case my first three CDs were pretty landmark compilations – The Dukes Of Stratosphear’s (XTC), Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, Joy Division’s Substance, and the self-titled Mission Of Burma compilation, one of the first to crack the 80 minute barrier. The Mission Of Burma was especially a revelation, my first exposure to them. It was apparently a momentous event for many — in interview, members of R.E.M. and The Pixies couldn’t stop talking about how they were obsessively listening to the reissue. The singles “Academy Fight Song” and “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” were brilliant, of course, but the early material didn’t document what a legendarily loud band they were. Only the instrumental “All World Cowboy Romance” hints at their expansive power. The guitars jangle and then divebomb, together with Martin Swope’s tape loops, anticipates post-rock.
Vs. has no singles, but is singularly the most intense guitar album since possibly Fun House. Ann Arbor native Roger Miller saw The Stooges live, and was clearly influenced in channeling the chaos of their live shows. A much closer document of what Mission Of Burma actually sounded like, the guitars raged, shapeshifted, dissolved into fine mist, then slammed like a bag of anvils. Vs. sounded to me like guitars as expressionist art, a clear influence on Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth and Fugazi for starters. “Secrets” kicks off the album with a simple, repetitive riff, and pretty dense din of noise from the band, including chants and wails from Miller, Clint Conley and Peter Prescott. On “Train” and “Trem Two,” the interchanged vocals remind me of Gang Of Four,
While the atonal “New Nails” had some folks reaching for the skip button, in retrospect, with an assist from Miller’s trumpet, it’s an essential bridge between No Wave and Dog Faced Hermans, Cows and Tragic Mulatto. The moody “Dead Pool” is almost meditative with it’s chiming guitar lick, but with some underlying eerie chatter courtesy of Swope. “Learn How” has always been a highlight for me, getting the heaviest play on my radio show for it’s fantastic buildups and rapid-fire bass and drum fills. The complex rhythms of “Mica” and the menacing lurch of “Weatherbox” extend the album’s peak with two more amazing pieces of groundbreaking guitar rock. It’s not so much the band being hot shit instrumentalists or super tight — they would be out of their depth next to King Crimson. But just the imaginative variations of sounds and arrangements are pretty breathtaking. No one else was doing anything remotely similar in 1982.
The rough ‘n’ ready “The Ballad of Johnny Burma” and “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate” will please those craving more up-tempo garage punk. Various reissues include different bonus tracks, and the most recent offering by Fire Archives, based on the remaster from Matador, includes another highlight, “Forget,” an actual melodic, if noisy, love song. That and “Peking Spring” would have been welcome additions to the original album.
And then that was it. The band broke up because they were so loud, they gave Miller tinnitus. Since then their legend has grown, and 22 years later they realized they had a much larger audience than the one they originally won over in the local Boston club scene. So they reconvened and recorded four more solid to exceptional albums.
#39 #5albums82
#50 Slicing Up Eyeballs
#19 Acclaimed Music
