Goddamn, I fucking love Burmese. For those of you who don't know, Burmese is a group of San Francisco audio terrorists who, over the past 13 years, have consistently, creatively, and crushingly mixed powerviolence, sludge, grindcore, doom, and free noize into a pulverizing and idiosyncratic concoction that may not have garnered them any real fame, but has certainly made them notorious throughout the Bay Area. Their revolving lineup of musicians, the only constants of which are two bassists named Mike, has included many drummers (including John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees) and singers, but never any guitarists, making for a primal low-end assault equal parts Whitehouse, early Swans, Man is the Bastard, and that drunk homeless dude yelling at you on the subway. They're currently rounded out by two drummers and Tissue, their deceptively petite female vocalist whose throat-shredding growl would put the most massively muscled metal meathead's to shame.
Burmese is more than a band, they're a perpetually evolving, ridiculously tenacious media beast; the epitome of aggressive noise-not-music. They've thrown care to the wind, switching musicians, labels, and genres as if it were the most natural thing in the world, without ever compromising their quality or content. In fact, they've only gotten better. Their newest album, 2011's Lun Yurn (roughly translated from the Cantonese as "Fuck Face"), is easily one of their best. It's way more technical than its predecessors, and decidedly more "metal," at turns dense and confusingly intricate, loose and sprawlingly abstract, and proggy without resorting to the styling's usual self-righteous wankery. It's a very rewarding listen, full of surprises, not the least of which is the last song, an absolutely batshit insane, relentlessly brutal 45-minute improvisational noise jam that not only proves it's ok for music to be painful again, but that it can be rapturous too. Burmese hurts so good.
Download: Burmese - Lun Yurn
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