It might seem odd for a unit as creatively vital as Mission of Burma to tour on the back of material rereleased after almost 30 years, but guitarist-vocalist Roger Miller, calling from his home in Boston, sees it a little differently. “The reissues just came out, so it’s like we’re doing our latest album,” he offers drolly, about a tour that brings the hugely influential postpunk act to Vancouver for the second time since Burma surprised everybody (including itself) by re-forming in 2002 after 19 years.

The band has hardly rested on its laurels since then. Miller, vocalist-bassist Clint Conley, and vocalist-drummer Peter Prescott—along with Shellac’s Bob Weston, who handles the tape-manipulation role first invented for Burma by Martin Swope—quickly generated enough material for a new album, ONoffON, in 2004, and followed that two years later with The Obliterati. Proudly described by Miller as “a sprawling mess”, the latter is as extraordinary and original as anything Burma produced in its first incarnation between 1979 and 1983. But it’s the 1981 EP Signals, Calls and Marches that the band will play from top to bottom for Vancouver (albeit augmented, as in Matador’s reverent reissue, with “Academy Fight Song” and three other rarities, plus “six other songs from the earliest period of the band”, according to Miller). Live, Burma has been alternating between this particular set and the full version of its first album, 1982’s Vs., since Matador unleashed lavish new versions of both in March.

“Nobody has given us shit for it,” Miller says, after pointing out that until this tour, his band had never played the same set twice. “It’s a very peculiar thing about Burma. Maybe it’s because the music is so chaotic, but it doesn’t seem to matter that much what we actually play, as long as we play with the same kind of verve.” Burma’s legend derives from its role in bringing compulsive, brainy experimentalism to the early U.S. punk scene, culminating in Vs. “What I like about Vs. is that it covers everything from, like, power pop to incredibly disjunct, avant-garde, almost nonmusical stuff,” Miller says, though it’s Signals, Calls and Marches that gave the world Burma’s most familiar number.

“That’s When I Reach for My Revolver” might be the best illustration of what one unnamed critic, quoted in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, described as Burma’s genius for “avant garde music you could shake your fist to”. Powerful, caustic, and exciting, “Revolver” is, once heard, never forgotten (although readers are encouraged to forget Moby’s pasty cover version from 1996). Fans old and new will be psyched to hear the song, but given Burma’s constitutional restlessness, it’s no shock when Miller describes the reissue tour as “a trip”, adding that “after this, I’ll be glad to get back to business.”

“We’re not good planners, we’re not very career-oriented, but new material is being written,” he says. “So the way I look at it, as long as new material is being written, we’re alive.”

Georgia Straight, September 2008