Mission Accomplished

Burma takes its earliest successes on a victory lap.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jun 25, 2008

RETURNING SIGNALS: For their current tour, Mission of Burma are recreating their earliest releases in order. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Even a novice musician knows you don't open with your best song. But three minutes after they take the stage on Saturday night, Mission of Burma will have finished playing "Academy Fight Song," the closest thing to a hit single they ever had.

"There's nothing we can do," says Roger Miller, the Boston trio's guitar player. "We have to play these songs."

What's tying Burma's hands is the running order of their Signals, Calls, and Marches, originally released in 1981, and re-released earlier this year, along with their 1982 album Vs. and the live collection The Horrible Truth About Burma, released after the band broke up in 1983. To promote the reissues, the band is devoting its live shows to playing Signals and Vs. in their entirety, offering the EP and the album on alternating nights. (Boston and New York got a pair of shows apiece, but if Philadelphians want to hear them play Vs. , they'll have to drive to DC on Saturday.)

The time-traveling jaunt was inspired by the Pitchfork Festival's request for a Vs. show, which the band will play in Chicago on July 18. But the idea also "just seemed to be in the air," Miller says. From Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation to the GZA's Liquid Swords, complete-album shows have been mushrooming in recent years. In the era of single-track downloads and endless shuffle, listening to an album from beginning to end has become a rare experience, like sampling an exotic foodstuff. It's easier to spend a night out listening to an album played live than to find 45 uninterrupted minutes at home.

It's one thing to devote a show to a conceptually cohesive double-album, and another to a six-song EP. Even including Burma's debut single, "Academy Fight Song"/"Max Ernst" and two previously unfinished songs from the same era, the expanded Signals runs only 33 minutes, hardly enough for an evening's entertainment. To fill out the set, the band has dusted off other songs from the same era that that they haven't played live since reforming in 2002, including "Anti-Aircraft Warning," which actually dates back to Miller and bassist Clint Conley's pre-Burma band Moving Parts. In all, says Miller, a dozen "resuscitates" have been added to the band's repertoire.

Among the (so to speak) new songs is "Outlaw," the second track on the original Signals, which has not figured in the set lists since 1983, in part because it's something of a bitch to play. The song, Miller explains, is "not harmonically cohesive. It's not based on a modulation of chords. It's based on things squeezing together. It's more of a visual pattern."

Unlike his bandmates, Conley and drummer Peter Prescott, Miller went to music school, which gave him access to a vocabulary drawn from contemporary avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Béla Bartók. While Miller says he has "no interest in putting 20th-century quote-unquote serious music" into the band's songs, "some of it gets carried through." The tension between those influences and the melodic and rhythmic demands of rock music is what gives Burma's songs their often thrilling tension.

On the one hand, Miller proudly points to Burma's departure from traditional rock-band practices. "Laugh the World Away," a Vs. resuscitate, contains sections of free-form improvisation, which Miller says is "completely uncommon in rock music. You might have a guitar solo, but everybody else is playing the riff." On the other hand, Miller points to a rich history of musicians going outside the boundaries or 4/4 time and blues chord changes, from Jimi Hendrix to Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. "There's a long tradition of it," he says. "We just do it in our own completely insane way."

The reunited Burma has recorded two albums of new material which arguably equal their earlier achievements, making their current foray into nostalgia a trifle odd. But Miller says the return to early material has brought back the feelings that attended their first reunion shows. "It's the first time since 2002 where I walk on stage and go, 'Look at all these people. Why are they here?' It's kind of come back to me, that shock that people like us," he says.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Mission of Burma will play Fri., June 27, 8:30 p.m., $18, with Versus, at the First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., r5productions.com.

 

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