Disco de Mission of Burma: “Horrible Truth About Burma”

First, I implore you to ignore abrasive, mediocre reviews. This, a document of the final tour by a band gone WAY before their time, is wonderful.

A live album can be a tricky thing, but Burma delivered onstage & that is captured to good effect here. Cover songs are monsters (Stooges & Pere Ubu) and originals are given that extra kick (Peking Spring ROCKS). Martin Swope in particular is revealed here as a fuller collaborator that on the studio albums, tweaking, spindling, folding & mutilating chunks of the band' playing & sending them back though the sound system in realtime via analog tape loops, way before any samplers were around. Fine stuff from a band having one last blast of decibels before hanging it up.

Don't let any negative reviews scare you away: If you really want to know what Mission of Burma were about Back In The Day, look no further: The Horrible Truth perfectly captures the brilliant, brutal fury of this hugely influential band at their very peak.

Guitarist Roger Miller often said that the reason Vs., Burma's widely acclaimed studio masterpiece, so eclipsed their earlier studio efforts was the fact that Vs. was essentially recorded live in the studio. By extrapolation then, "The Horrible Truth" is an even more significant recording than Vs., because it captures all the immediacy and rawness of Burma in an actual live setting.

That Burma was/is really a live band, and not creatures of the studio, is an important point. Every twist and wierd effect you hear on Vs. can be -- and was in fact intended to be -- reproduced in real time in a live setting. If you have been lucky enough to catch Burma live, you will know I do not exaggerate when I say that their live shows blow away anything they've recorded in the studio -- with perhaps the exception of The Horrible Truth.

So what you get here are roaring, sizzling, edgy performances -- especially "Tremelo", "1970" and the jaw-dropping Pere Ubu cover, "Heart Of Darkness" -- albeit with a slightly less refined mix than what one would expect from a studio recording like Vs. But make no mistake: this is essential Burma.

Hey is that other message from Martin Swope? Tape god extrordinaire?