Mission of Burma

Time’s taken nothing from Mission of Burma. The Boston foursome enjoyed a firefly career from 1979 to 1983—yielding exactly one album, a classic EP and two singles before vaulting into oblivion. When the band plugged back in for a 2002 reunion, the response was ecstatic. The subsequent ONoffON and the new The Obliterati remarkably announced that Burma still had plenty to holler about over its raging slabs of dissonance and jackknifing tempo shifts. On this latest batch of songs, the group sounds damn near rust-proof.

Peter Prescott hammers the drums like he’s dumping a warehouse full of trash cans on your roof. Roger Miller rakes the guitar with a passionate rigor that propels choppy riffs into explosive breaks, spraying tensile shards. Clint Conley turns bass lines into predatory statements: muscular, nimble and lurking. Along with engineer and tape-looper Bob Weston (also of Chicago’s Shellac), the group makes a cathartic racket. The arrangements can be as dense as a stack of bricks, so what you mostly pick up on is mood: tortured falsettos, strained middle-aged male yelps, and perverse interjections in songs about punctuation and Nancy Reagan’s head. If the stately “13” is nearly a Joy Division tribute, an exercise in manic gloom, there’s new touches as well. “Is This Where?” feels Brazilian, with lyrical guitar picking and breathy, near-feminine vocals, while “Donna Sumeria” begs for a DJ remix to extrapolate its club-floor affinities. Despite two decades out of circulation, the band never lost its swerve.—Steve Dollar

Mission of Burma plays the Pitchfork Music Festival July 30.