Album Review: Mission Of Burma
The Sound, The Speed, The Fucking Glory
Sometimes it’s a very tactile thing we associate. Marcel Proust had his madeleine cookies and tea moment that spurred on a copious rush of long forgotten childhood memories (many volumes, to the delight of modern literature the world over).
There are chilled times, especially around Christmas that the most hardened of us stop and do half turns, around and around a shopping center, sounds of noels shrinking us back to a much older time when we can feel the peculiar warmth from wearing rubber boats and three socks while trudging, soaking wet through the snow.
When I listen to Mission Of Burma, it carries me to a time in life when I assumed knowledge of nothing. Each word I didn’t know, I looked up in the open dictionary on my desk. If a person or place were referenced, I’d dig into the 23 volume, gold and maroon encyclopedia set that lined up neatly above the cookbooks in my mother’s kitchen. She got it in exchange for stamps she got at the grocery store (the same store, I note, that had a ‘Cookie Credit Card’ for kids, redeemable for one chocolate chip cookie, the likes of which I’ve not had since). Those books were limited, something I see now. Those encyclopedias were worn out around Presidents and baseball: subjects I was curious about almost preternaturally.
When I brought a Mission Of Burma cassette tape home to that kitchen at the age of 14, I looked up the country referenced in the title. I can still smell the gold leaf paint on the book pages that lived on fingertips hours afterward. The way they cracked as a new binding opened and I learned something new. Almost 20 years later, I still recall cross-legged on their hardwood floors. The band from Boston brings me there.
Mission Of Burma album review: The Sound, The Speed, The Light
Posted: December 19th, 2009 under Music Reviews.