Roger Miller, of the much loved, double-lived post-punk outfit Mission of Burma, had been out of the frame for decades when that band reunited. The reunion shows were pure love of the game — for fans and band members alike — and evidently Miller wasn’t ready to retire again when Burma’s second run drew to a close in the early teens. His new project, Trinary System, continues in the elegant, abstract, agitated firestorm tradition of Miller’s Burma’s songs, with an unmistakable swagger.
Miller’s new band adheres to the same basic configuration as the old one. He takes up center stage on guitar and vocals. Larry Dersch of Binary System and AKACOD plays drums and Andrew Willis of The Web and Crappy Nightmareville…
…holds down on bass. There’s a great deal of Miller in the band’s basic DNA — which makes a few of the songs sound very Burma-like — but the new band delves much further into kraut rock, classic rock, even funk and blues than the previous one.
Thus opener “When the Dust Settles,” sports a very familiar austere and jagged rumble, oblique lyrics and sudden flights into falsettoed tunefulness, its clatter and jutting, intersecting rhythms very much in line with prior Miller songs (“Spider’s Web,” comes to mind). Things fall apart in Miller songs. Elaborate constructions come crashing down. Rube Goldberg contraptions of rhythm, incantation, athletic guitar scrabble and tune take wiry shape and then shake apart into pieces. As Miller sings in this opening song, “I love chaos cos you get to see what new forms show up when the dust settles.”
“Infinity in a Box,” then, takes a rattling, propulsive kraut-ish shape. Its extended reverie works first without vocals—a skeletal walking bass underpinning warm washes of guitar—and then with them, in spatters of verbiage studded with hidden rhythms and internal rhymes. It’s a Rubik’s Cube of a song, full of sharp, shiny, colorful edges that align in abrupt, unexpected ways and then, just as suddenly, go out of joint.
“Modular Life” along with “Work It” take on a more physical, body-centric heft with simple, repetitive chants (“I need a modular life” and “I love to work, when I’m working on what I love,” respectively) shouted out over music that damn near boogies. “Modular Life” leans into syncopated, funk rhythms and blues-tinged, vibrating bent notes, while “Work It” punches out a blocky, straightforward beat, but both proceed with undiluted enthusiasm. No interlocking puzzles here, but much of the sweaty joy of rocking and rolling.
Lights in the Center of Your Head is a surprising amount of fun, intricate when it needs to be, but solidly anchored in rock-hard foundations of rock, funk and blues. — dusted