bidhardcore.com

Well today is de facto the busiest day of the year at my job and as a result I haven’t had any time to prepare a real post. I went to see Mission Of Burma do their Signals Calls and Marchesshow last night. Here’s the setlist:

• playland
• peking spring
• new disco
• eyes of men (!!!)
• active in the yard (might have misidentified this?)
• academy fight song
• execution
• devotion
• max ernst
• revolver
• outlaw
• fame and fortune
• this is not a photograph
• red
• all world cowboy romance

came back for an encore that was:

• a cover of a song by the Girls (didn’t catch the title - i pose)
• the first 4 songs from Obliterati (2006 lp):
  • 2wice
  • spider’s web
  • let yourself go
  • donna sumeria

Seriously they were wonderful. Mission of Burma is probably my all time favorite Boston band. They’re not a hardcore band, but they were liked by the Boston Crew back in the day — the dvd of their final day show at the Bradford proves this with the whole Boston Crew in stage dive mode for the whole set. Of course that’s also the infamous last Negative FX show from which came the declaration “WE AINT GONNA STOP - FUCK YOU”. I’ve always loved the clash of high and low culture. The way Burma could mix up influences like Wire, Roxy Music, Pere Ubu etc. with skull bashing garage punk like The Stooges, The Dils, and so on. I’m often drawn to groups that are able to clash the high and the low. I find it compelling. I’m going to see them do their VS. lpstart to finish tonight, and I’m really giddy like a little girl. I’ll spare a long entry on the band since they’re technically not a hardcore band, but let me just say there was a moment in the band’s history (near the end of their initial run) when they were surely influenced and flirting with Hardcore sounds. Around 82/83 when the style had taken over the city of Boston they really started incorporating faster tempos into their work. OK/No Way, The Ballad Of Johnny Burma, That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Active In The Yard, Dumbells, Go Fun Burn Man, Blackboard, House Flaming — all of these songs were sort of Burma-fied approximations of the Hardcore sound. Much more melodic and angular, but you can’t deny that some of the style had seeped into them. Next week though, back to some more traditional “Hardcore” talk.