REVIEW: Burning Airlines, Mission: Control (DeSoto)
- Steve Kandell
If you're a fan of the DC band Jawbox, there's some good news and there's some bad news.
Let's get the bad news over with: Jawbox broke up last year.
But here's the good news: Jawbox didn't really break up last year. Sure, they're traveling under a new moniker, Burning Airlines, and bassist Kim Colletta is no longer in the lineup, but Jawbox's singer/songwriter/guitarist/capo di tutti capi J. Robbins is still the frontman and co-songwriter/rhythm guitarist Bill Barbot has made the switch to bass. Coletta, who runs the label that put out this album, is hardly far from the fold, and her split seems to be as amicable as they come. Burning Airlines' drummer, Peter Moffett, is new, but played with Robbins in the seminal Government Issue a decade ago. And even Jawbox recorded with two different drummers during their eight-year career, so this is not exactly a drastic upheaval of personnel. No grisly deaths by overdose or plane crash, no bitter lawsuits, no euphemistic mentions of "creative differences" - as rock band breakups go, Jawbox has not done a very good job of breaking up at all.
Nor is the music anything unfamiliar. The new incarnation takes Jawbox's melodic but hard-driving post-punk and reimagines it as...melodic but hard-driving post-punk. Some might argue that Burning Airlines might lean a little more on the melodic, but the band's debut album Mission: Control would not sound out of place at all in Jawbox's canon. The album opens with "Carnival," "Wheaton Calling," and "Pacific 231," which are jaunty and bouncy where a lot of Jawbox's songs are bottom-heavy and thick, a change that might be directly attributable to Coletta's departure. Of course, the hyperkinetic "Crowned" and Barbot's excellent "Meccano" are denser in arrangement and pretty much go against everything I just said.
The album makes for a good listen, but over repeated listenings, no one song stands out as catchy or memorable the way "Savory" did. The lyrics, and even the band's overall motif, are concerned with themes of machinery, and indeed the band's precision and Robbins' delivery could be seen as somewhat mechanical. What is lacking is a little more soul and improvisation, although the potential seems to be there. Smack in the middle of the album is "(my pornograph)," a sound collage/instrumental based on a clip from Orson Welles' The Trial that is a bit more arty than the average straightforward Jawbox song. And there's also a brief untitled hidden track, a few minutes after album closer "I Sold Myself In," that is more frantic and keyboard-laced than the other songs, perhaps a sign of more interesting directions to come for the nascent band.
All in all, given the principals involved, it is no surprise that Burning Airlines is not trying to reinvent the wheel here but rather expand on a tried-and-true formula: guitars, bass, drums, verse-chorus-verse, shake well, and repeat. It's decent, if unremarkable stuff, but if you're a fan of the late Jawbox, there is nothing here that will sound particularly foreign or jarring.
