Sunday, Oct. 4 was officially Mission of Burma day in the city of Boston. City Councilor John Tobin drafted a resolution calling for recognition of the "legendary and influential post-punk rock group" as a way to "celebrate the institutions that have consistently provided their city with art and entertainment." Agreeing with an elected official may not seem very punk-rock, but in this case, I think the right honorable Mr. Tobin is spot-on. Mission of Burma really the reigning elder of the Boston music scene, and short of a bronze statue in Copley Square, I think this pleasant autumn Sunday was a fine testament.

The band celebrated its day with a free outdoor show at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ushering in the release of its new album The Sound the Speed the Light, its fifth as a band and third since reuniting in 2004. The Sound the Speed the Light gives us a Burma we know well; the brooding chants, the turbulent drumming, Roger Miller's angular guitar work full of discord and tremolo, it's all there. Songs like the snarling "So Fuck It" reveal a Burma as mean as ever, and the subtle "Forget Yourself" offers a dirge to follow the classic "Trem Two."

While it may lack the presence and fervor of their earliest releases, The Sound the Speed the Light is still chock-full of the crescendos and sonic onslaughts that have defined the band's style since its formation in 1979. Burma experimented with sounds and dissonances decades before elaborate guitar effects had become the expectation and noise-rock was a genre onto itself. There were plenty of other influential bands to come out of Massachusetts in the '80s, but before Black Francis was squealing with the Pixies and even before Dinosaur Jr. had actualized the full potential of distortion, there was Burma, pushing the envelope and practically inventing on-stage looping in the process.

In 1983, Burma disbanded with hardly anyone noticing just how far ahead of the curve they had been. Its breakup was largely due to guitarist Roger Miller's horrific tinnitus, which caused unrelenting ringing in his ears, and made the very process of making music painful. But no less a factor must have been that MOB was simply too far ahead of its time to find a real audience. It wasn't until Cliff, Pete, Roger and Martin had called it quits and gotten day jobs that people finally stopped to think, "Hey, maybe there really is something to this whole noise thing."

With the release of ONoffon in 2004 followed by The Obliterati in 2006, we finally got an answer to what might have if the band had lasted through the rest of the '80s with the rise of the underground music scene and the growth of a noise-happy audience to support it. For those already well-versed in the Burma canon, The Sound the Speed the Light offers a mature iteration of the style and technique that has earned them their place as one of the most important bands of the post-punk era. And for those who have never shared the experience of Mission of Burma before, you should probably stop reading this paper right now and go find a copy of the band's 1982 album Vs.