Song of the Day # 271 Mission of Burma

'Incorporating the avant-rock of underground Cleveland bands like Pere Ubu, the angular slash and burn of the English post punks, the trance repetition of German Bands like an and Neu, and the aggressive propulsion of The Ramones, Mission of Burma, 'invented a new way to snarl', wrote critic Rob Sheffield, ' the sound that American indie bands have been tinkering with ever since'.

 

Any excuse to write about this quite staggering band. They've featured before on this blog but not on this particular series so here goes. I first heard of them when R.E.M. namedropped them amongst list of countless others in their early interviews at the start of the eighties. They'd already split. Frankly their name was enough, (it came from a plaque the band noticed in the diplomatic district of New York, 'it was murky and kind of disturbing'). Their records were not freely available in the UK at this point so I caught up late. They're a quite one off group. You can hear flashes of sound in their songs that remind you of others and where you can hear their influence on innumerable bands that came after but they're really just flashes, the band are moving so fast. Their only full album 'Vs', will be winging its way to my doormat shortly having mesmerised me for an hour at work early yesterday afternoon. This was their early radio college hit, not actually a single as this was in the late Seventies before the American Independent Sector had really established a network. It's about the Chinese revolutionary movement where the notorious Gang of 4 attempted to seize power. Appropriately Leeds band Gang of 4 are probably the contemporary band Mission of Burma have most in common with. But somehow the Boston band sound freer to me. Listen to them. They've reformed and are still making ground-breaking records. Immense. They also feature in a chapter of Michael Azerad's ,'Our Band Could Be Your Life', which is well worth tracking down.

 

Here's Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth writing about the band:

 

 

 

'I always felt a kinship with them, although Sonic Youth were never intimates with them like we were later with the Swans, the Laughing Hyenas, or Die Kreuzen. I saw Mission of Burma when they first came to New York and played the original Danceteria. Nobody really knew anything about them, but Jim Fouratt would actually book these unknown regional bands. He would listen to the tapes and if he liked them have them open for the Bush Tetras or something.

 

I walked in and Burma were already in full concert mode, and it was really shocking, because they were playing really heavy guitar music, but not like punk-rock-guitar music. It was something we were only hearing through the bands that were into the mass-guitar post-MC5 vibes that were resonating through guys like Glenn Branca. And Mission of Burma were not approaching it in an academic way. They were these guys in flannel shirts and jeans really going at it. It was beautiful ringing loud guitar music, so I was knocked out.

When Sonic Youth started and Jim Fouratt booked us at Danceteria, it was opening for Mission of Burma, although I don't think Mission of Burma were making too much of a dent in the New York scene. But they rang true for me. Branca also saw them and was turned on by them. At that time a lot of the music in New York's underground had to do with no-wave funk, which I really dug because elements of that music are wonderful. But Burma were among the few bands that would display something wholly other than what was going on in the New York eye of the hurricane when they came to town. R.E.M. was like that too.

When we opened for them, it was really cool. I was really into the fact that we were playing with them, and I was hoping they would see us and see that there were bands in New York that weren't playing no-wave funk. We were at our most cacophonous. We were doing one song where I would stick a cowbell under the guitar strings and bend the strings up with it to create this squall. I remember after sound check one of the members of Burma saying, "That cowbell song was pretty good."

Today I don't see their influence in the mainstream at all. The whole neo-punk-rock scene – a lot of those bands don't reference what was going on in the American underground in the '80s. A lot of them are influenced by each other and by Nirvana and share the same signifiers, be it the Misfits or something else.

Bands like Burma had a quality to their songwriting that was really accessible, really uplifting, and I don't hear that kind of plain good songwriting in mainstream radio. When I spin the radio dial, it confuses me because there is so much good music out there, and very, very rarely will it hit radio. A lot of what's coming out of the radio is so insipid.

Over the years we would meet up with Roger and would play with the [Peter Prescott] Volcano Suns. The Burma legacy was very strong. Most people who played in bands in the '80s and '90s were aware of it. I think it was more significant for musicians. At that time Mission of Burma, the Butthole Surfers, and the Big Boys were the really interesting bands, because they weren't standardizing. They were coming out of punk and playing music that was sophisticated, in a sense, in this classic unsophisticated quality. There was a certain proletarian standardization in hardcore, so it was great to see and hear bands like Mission of Burma and the Big Boys step away from that with no ambitions toward the mainstream. I still put ‘Academy Fight Song’ on mix tapes.'