Mission Of Burma - 'ONoffON' (Matador)
4/5
By: Kevin Molloy
Mission of Burma: 'On a scale of one to ten it was a forty-nine'. One thing you certainly can't do is criticise Burma for being lacklustre, despite a 22-year stagnation. Quite impressive, then, that they're actually still here.
The first listen to the 'ONoffON' is a rivetingly strange experience. The opening three tracks grab you by your jugular, and leave your head reeling... but the experience seems to tail off - the last tracks slide past in a spectacularly inoffensive manner, given the wailing guitar experimentation and aural bruises received during the first half. Surely a group that shared the stage with Sonic Youth and Gang Of Four wouldn't give us an album that promises so much, only to peter out with fillers? Then a little notice in the sleeve-notes catches rockfeedback's attention: 'Burma encourages Shuffleplay'. Well, we wouldn't leave an LP at a single listen anyway, so what the heck? And that small notice saved this CD from passing into the hands of a Camden record-store for resale.
The fact is that there are no singles on 'ONoffON'; just a handful of great songs, in no reasonably explicable order. The songwriting politics of the band are more disparate after their separation of over two decades, which goes someway to explaining the predicament. Hence 'shuffleplay', or the 'random' button, helping the flailing tracklisting out no end; its effect is to ensure all songs receive equal importance. The work we know as 'ONoffON' wasn't made as a coherent album, but rather as a collection of songs from three erstwhile collaborators.
Nothing, however, can disguise the sheer brilliance of Roger Miller's axe-work. Every song is a showcase to the art of contorting the six-string and squeezing the impossible out of the paper-cones of the speakers, before Bob (Shellac) Weston gives them the final twist on production, wending both insidiously and with full frontal attack into your head. All of this without the record ever sounding wanky or egocentric - a skill indeed, because who really wants to be like Van Halen? (Careful! - libel/liberal Ed.)
Burma do at points regain the lofty, anthemic heights of 'Revolver', with the quasi-political chants of 'Wounded World' ('I'm a puppet, you're a puppet too') and 'The Setup', but this LP showcases a more musically diverse collection of influences - and unfortunately not always to good effect. Whilst drummer Prescott adds one of the album's highlights in the fantastic 'The Enthusiast', elsewhere his songs are childishly naïve for a band that were once avant-garde; bassist Clint Conley injects a softer side with gentler harmonies, but tracks like 'Nicotine Bomb', despite their strengths, feel out of place within the given context.
Its strengths are in the rhythms, guitar freakery and incredible tightness (courtesy again of Mr Bob Weston?); the weaknesses lie in a lack of unity, or real belief. Yet whilst 'times have changed and so too have our needs', Burma have managed to avoid the middle-aged road to mediocrity majestically, and have proved that any dismissal would be more than imprudent. Let's hope for album three within the next twenty years then... please?
Artists in this article: Mission Of Burma
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