Burning Airlines
Mission Control
DeSoto, PO Box 60335, Washington DC 20039<BR>
Release Date: 1999
When most underground bands make the leap to the major label farm system, their former fans slap them with the "sellout" tag. When Jawbox did it, the indie rock kids stayed home at night to watch the "Savory" video on 120 Minutes.
Working outside The System is one thing, but who would argue the fact that millions of schoolgirls hanging Kim Coletta posters in their bedrooms and scribbling J. Robbins lyrics on the textbooks wouldn't lead to positive societal change? American culture was going to get more thoughtful and intelligent, and Jawbox would lead the surge.
Of course, that didn't happen. And when the band's self-titled second major label release failed to spawn a radio hit within a month of release, Jawbox was dropped, and the band called it quits shortly thereafter.
Entertainment writers hopped all over the story as a metaphor for the changing winds of popular music. Jawbox escaped without becoming quite as badly commodified as hometown cohorts Fugazi (who millions of Rolling Stone readers must think is actually a political party rather than a rock band), but still, the uniformally outstanding live and recorded musical legacy that Jawbox left behind was largely ignored in favor of media-fabricated society-and-culture stories.
So it's ironic that the first full-length output from ex-Jawboxers, Burning Airlines' Mission Control, very well might have been the breakthrough success that band never recorded.
The three piece features Jawbox guitarists J. Robbins and Bill Barbot, with Robbins' former Government Issue bandmate Peter Moffett on drums. Barbot has switched to bass, and the stripped-down lineup creates a much more economical sound than the dense, complex racket for which Jawbox was renowned. Gone are the twisting guitar lines and counter-rhythms; Burning Airlines is forced to develop a whole new attack at inverting the pop song. What they ultimately find is -- the hook.
Robbins and Barbot have always had a knack for pulling a tuneful melody out of chaos, but nothing they've done in the past hinted at the outright infectiousness of "The Escape Engine." I've been singing Barbot's back-up wail in my sleep for weeks. It's catchy in a way that would make your N'Synch-crushing 11-year-old cousin sing along.
I winced when I heard the Clash-ey guitar line that starts the second track, and outright cringed when I saw that it's titled "Wheaton Calling." But the opening staccato guitar cliche is merely a jumping-off point for swinging verses that wouldn't be out of place in a Tom Jones revue, and a glorious chorus that literally explodes.
The record does have some bumps in the road. Track six, "(my pornograph)", is a dull noisescape riding beneath a standard-issue film soundbyte. Coming after "The Escape Engine," it's a major loss of momentum that the album never really regains. "3 Sisters" is a pretty, well, power ballad, for lack of a better term, but "Flood of Foreign Capital" is rather nondescript and "Sweet Deals on Surgery" rocks, but rocks like the stuff Jawbox was writing eight years ago.
Despite its shortcomings, Mission Control is a fantastic and natural move forward for Robbins and Barbot. More importantly, it's a powerful debut statement from a new band -- a new band that hopefully will be appreciated for the quality of its work rather than a fabricated greater significance.
-- Jonathan Carson
carson@outersound.com
