Every week, I will fire up the Shuffle Songs option on my iPod; the first song to come up, no matter what it is, will get an instant, unvarnished review. We're at the mercy of random chance and the limits of my digital music collection. Let's see where this takes us.

That's When I Reach for My Revolver
Mission of Burma, The Horrible Truth about Burma

I bought Horrible Truth a couple of years ago after having my interest piqued by the Mission of Burma chapter in Michael Azzerad's Our Band Could Be Your Life. I probably shouldn't have gotten a live album; while you can recognize the framework of a cool song underneath a couple of these, the album generally sounds like muddy shit. I suppose the horrible truth is that MoB were better as a studio band; weird that they're so up-front about it.

Like last week, I did manage to stumble onto one of the better songs on an album that pretty much leaves me cold. "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" would be an excellent song with better production... it's got zip and the chorus has a great anthemic sound to it. But as far as I'm concerned, this is a case where it might take a different band's cover interpretation to release the song from its chains and let it rock like it was originally meant to.