Burning Airlines: Wires Wrapped Around the Pulse

Some bands don’t die. They fray at the ends, get tangled in your guts, haunt your stereo like a power line fallen in a storm. Still crackling, still hot. Burning Airlines never fit the frame. Too jagged for the narratives, too clean-cut to be lumped in with the noise freaks, too crooked to go pop. They were always in-between. Always mid-collapse. And somehow, that made them eternal.

J. Robbins wasn’t supposed to be here. After Jawbox shut down in ’97—one of the greatest modern rock bands to get steamrolled by the major-label circus—you figured he’d vanish into producer limbo or show up playing bass in some band five steps beneath him. But instead, he formed Burning Airlines. And in 1999 dropped Mission: Control! Not just a continuation, but a recalibration. All the wiry tension of Jawbox, but more aerodynamic. Hooks like trapdoors. Rhythms knotted up like power lines in a storm.

The original trio—Robbins, bassist Bill Barbot (also Jawbox alumni), and drummer Peter Moffett (ex-Government Issue)—played with precision but never came off clinical. “Carnival” opens Mission: Control! with those chiming harmonics and Moffett’s surgically tight groove. Robbins sings it with that familiar edge of weariness and warning: “This is not a test / It's just an unannounced incursion…” The band wasn’t posturing. It was all function, no flex. And it still sounds fresh.

Barbot left immediately after recording the first album, before the band hit the road. Mike Harbin stepped in on bass as the band shifted to full-speed touring mode. And by the time Identikit dropped in 2001, the band had mutated. The sound was broader, more textured, less hemmed in. It mutates in places Mission: Control! only hinted at. “Morricone Dancehall” and “The Surgeon’s House” both stretch the form without snapping it. Robbins’ voice bends and floats, still anchored in the DC scene’s discipline but unafraid to drift into stranger spaces. “The Deluxe War Baby” is peak Robbins. Cerebral, acidic, melodic as hell.

They didn’t just burn through the States. Europe caught the signal too—tours across Germany, the UK, places where the word "post-hardcore" didn’t need translation.

And then there’s the name. Burning Airlines. Taken from Brian Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” off his 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). A sideways nod to glam-era unease. Pure Robbins. But post-9/11, it turned into baggage. Even though the band predated the attacks, venues got hesitant. Promoters didn’t always want it on the flyer. It was a weird time, and Burning Airlines didn’t fit cleanly into it. By 2002, they were done. No swan song, no dramatic implosion. Just silence.

They left behind two albums, some live bootlegs, and a fault line that runs through the underground. No, they weren’t famous. No, they didn’t change the industry. But ask around. People who were paying attention heard something important. You can hear flickers of their architecture in early Trail of Dead, in the surgical groove of Minus the Bear, the sandpaper melodics of Mclusky. Whether they were listening or not, the wiring feels familiar.

J. Robbins didn’t disappear. He just shifted lanes. Channels, Office of Future Plans, solo material. All rock-solid. And maybe more importantly, he kept producing. His fingerprints are all over the last two decades of underground rock. Behind the boards for everyone from The Dismemberment Plan to Lemuria. The guy's a conduit, always tuning into something raw and real.

What gnaws at you when you revisit Mission: Control! and Identikit isn’t just that they hold up. It’s that they still feel ahead. Not frozen in time, not dated, but still racing. Like someone left the engine running in a locked room. If these albums dropped today, they’d blow through algorithm-choked playlists like a gas leak.

Burning Airlines didn’t stick around long enough to become a myth. No glossy retrospectives, no box sets, no twenty-year reunion circuit. Just a quiet colored vinyl reissue and a signal left humming.

They weren’t ghosts. Ghosts linger. Burning Airlines was the sound of the transmission cutting out mid-sentence. The flicker before the filament explodes. A name you remember because no one was supposed to say it. And if you felt it, you still do.

Still humming. Still hot.