You’ve Got Me Dead To Certain Rights

Got it too late to review it, and I wouldn’t feel qualified to in any case – their first record came out in the 1980s and I haven’t heard it – but Mission of Burma’s new, second post-reformation record, The Obliterati, is simply too solid and un-fuckwithable to just put it on my short list of 2006’s best CDs without passing comment. It’s just a perfect rock record, all around, adventurous and cluttered and attitude in-jokes galore (see “eating dinner on Matador’s dime” lyric from “Spider’s Web,” which I suspect is about confronting/facing down the machinery of the music industry) and not a moment wasted (unlike 2003’s onOFFon, which was just pretty darn good) – (relatively) new member Bob Weston’s tape manipulation abetting the two-chorded throttle and killer drums of the others, punk urgency and awesome songwriting chops wrestling and driving every song home to the point where I’m listening to this too damned much when there’s mounds of CDs I actually am being paid to review soon all over my desk right now. Sending The Obliterati to Bill this weekend is a necessity for sure.