Mission of Burma Defies Age in New York City

Since reforming in 2002 after nearly two decades off, Mission of Burma has released three albums, many songs from which were played Friday night at New York City's Bowery Ballroom.

"You guys have been patient, listening to a bunch of old farts' new songs," drummer Peter Prescott said during the encore, just before the legendary Boston post-punk trio -- or quartet, if you count tape manipulator Bob Weston, who works behind the scenes -- bashed out its best-known tune, the 1981 single 'Academy Fight Song.'

"If we only played old songs, we'd be nostalgia s---, and you wouldn't care anyways," Prescott added.

While that's not necessarily true -- fellow Bostonians the Pixies have, in recent years, gotten plenty of mileage out of their classic jams -- Mission of Burma is to be commended for standing by its latter-day output. Prescott, bassist Clint Conley and guitarist Roger Miller play like men with something to prove, even if the lone album they released in their youth, 1982's 'Vs.,' long ago cemented their place in history.

Luckily, Burma's new tunes are much like the old ones: engine loud, clockwork precise and often surprisingly melodic. Thanks to Prescott's starts and stops and Conley's driving bass lines, the songs almost never follow linear paths. They move from A to B in explosive increments, Miller's punk chords and pinched leads adding to the compartmentalized chaos.

Throughout Friday's performance, the first show in a two-night Bowery stint, the band was energetic enough to render age a non-issue. Even so, Prescott wouldn't let it go. "We've been around long enough that we've watched young people age in front of us," he said. "It's bad enough it's happening to us."

He and his band mates followed that statement with 'Einstein's Day,' a selection from 'Vs.' It was one of the evening's slower songs, and toward the end, Miller let loose a dirty-sounding solo, a series of notes he seemed to dredge from his guitar.

He exerted more effort than he needed to, further justifying a reunion that, new songs or not, few fans were apt to question.

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