Mission of Burma

Mission of Burma got going in Boston in 1979: Roger Miller played guitar, Clint Conley bass and Peter Prescott drums, while Martin Swope, crucially, worked the tapes: he manipulated the band's sound on audiotape and doubled as their sound engineer. Miller, Conley and Prescott shared the singing and the songwriting, and the result was post-punk that felt like it was tearing at its own seams, all jagged guitar, lunging rhythms and ghostly loops of noise.

Their records came out on Boston's small Ace of Hearts label. "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", from the Signals, Calls, and Marches EP, is the one that lodged in people's heads: a tense, brooding verse that breaks into a chorus of pure, desperate release. Vs., their only LP from that era, followed in 1982, with "Secrets" among its songs.

Then the volume caught up with them. Miller developed tinnitus from the band's deafening live shows, and they called it quits in 1983 with just two singles, an EP and that one album to their name. Nearly two decades later, in 2002, they came back with Bob Weston handling the tapes, made four more albums, among them ONoffON and The Obliterati, and eventually disbanded amicably.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.