Mission Of Burma’s European Vacation
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:49 pm by GerardMission Of Burma (shown above, performing ‘The Obliterati”s “Donna Sumeria” at last weekend’s Primavera Sound in Barcelona) are touring Europe as of this writing, and Roger Miller’s been chronicling the band’s adventures over at Burma’s MySpace page. My personal favorite passage would be Roger’s critique of Devo’s Primvera set :
I soldiered on until midnight (6 AM Boston time with 3 hours of sleep in a day and a half: the Jaegermeister helped alot) to catch DEVO. Finally, actual ideas executed well! What a joy! After a few of their famed videos, they launched into 3 synth-tracks from “New Traditionalists.” While this is not my fave LP of theirs by any means, it was totally charming. It seemed like they were gonna play the entire album, so i thought about leaving – I mean, who in their right mind would want to hear a band play an entire album?
June 4th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Since Roger– and Matablog– mentioned it… I begrudge Burma nothing, ever, so if they could get those $$$ gigs, good for them, although I’d feel a lot better about it if there were also “OnOffOn” & “Obliterati” gigs.
Still, in 99.95% of cases, it’s a vile, idiotic concept. Exceptions would be the verrrrry few legitimate song cycles (peach be unto Van Dyke Parks), or, how you say? Right: rock fucking opera. So as difficult to take as it is, Lou Reed “Berlin” actually gets a pass. The Slint cult who never heard the King Crimson records they rip waaaaay the hell off does not and I say that as one of the few who actually bought and enjoyed “Spiderland” at the time. (Then when some prog-metal pals played me the Crimson I was like uh… holy crap. But Gimmie Indie Rock 1991 didn’t know that, at least most of us didn’t.)
I go to a concert by a band I know hoping to have some OTHER version of the creativity they’ve already shown, not for some goddamn glorified classic album rock block bullshit– Captain Frank died for this?!
Concerned,
Professor Griff
June 5th, 2008 at 12:28 am
i’m not down with the concept either. That said, I’ve attended individual ‘play the classic album’ gigs by artists as disparate as Brian Wilson, Sonic Youth and Cheap Trick, all of whom did more than a handful of encores from other bits of their catalog(s).
I think you can safely assume that if you pay $20-$25 to see Mission Of Burma “perform ‘Signals Calls & Marches’, they’re gonna play more than 6 songs.