Help Me Help Myself

Mission of Burma - Dead Pool

At the 2:49 mark, the brilliance of this song emerges with the call and response vocal refrain “where did things go wrong?”, as the instruments fumble and stretch out the melody until the song suddenly just falls apart and ends.

Mission of Burma didn’t just fall apart and end though, as much as that would’ve made the previous paragraph come across as a sort of clever elegy. They decisively ended, as guitarist Roger Miller’s tinnitus became too unbearable. He played their last tour wearing the green protective headset one wears at a shooting range (a fantastic image, actually, captured on the excellent VHS document of their final 1983 show Live At The Bradford).

They still hold a mystique for me, an aura that I find best illustrated by the invisible live member Martin Swope, who used a tape machine to add this spectral, electronic voice from the soundboard (a more subdued version of Comets on Fire member Noel Von Harmonson and his Echoplex). They squeezed in to the post punk mood with slashing thin guitars over a tense rhythm section, but not the vibe, with bassist Clint Conley and his flannel shirts. College radio, the term anyone used before Alternative, is their closest kin but they were ahead of that curve by a few years. Bands like Gang of Four and Pere Ubu get brought up in relation, but Mission of Burma has always felt like a cult band, whose voice you hear but can’t see. They sound very American.

They reformed in the early 2000s and I was thrilled to finally see them. They hadn’t lost their power, even if they played at a slightly lower volume than they were known for. They only released one full LP, along with the outsanding Marches, Calls & Signals EP and a posthumous live album called The Horrible Truth About Burma. Roger Miller did have a solo career, which always made me wonder why Mission of Burma couldn’t have become a studio only band. Obviously there was much more to it than just that because drummer Peter Prescott by then had a whole new career with his excellent post-Burma band, The Volcano Suns. Damn, that band was good too.

Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have to much to do to waste time on bad music.