In 1988, a time when there was enough going on in the indie rock revolution to keep most folks from bothering with nostalgia, Rykodisc decided to remind folks about the first great lost band of post-punk, Mission of Burma, who were forced to call it quits at the height of their powers in 1983. Rykodisc's first release on the band, a compilation simply called Mission of Burma, was just about definitive, featuring Signals, Calls and Marches and Vs. in their entirety, a handful of rare single sides, and two cuts from the live album The Horrible Truth About Burma. For a while, this was the only Mission of Burma title in print, and it would be all but impossible to come up with a better single-disc compilation. But now that Ryko has reissued all three original Burma 12"ers in remastered form, and two discs of demos and miscellany are available from Taang!, that out of print compilation hardly seems quite as necessary, and now that the group has unexpectedly reunited (and cut a new album for Matador), Rykodisc has chosen to offer Accomplished: The Best of Mission of Burma, a 16-track hodgepodge culled from the three MoB discs in their catalog. Mission of Burma didn't record much music that wasn't essential, and pretty much every song on this disc is a must, making for a set of intelligent but powerfully physical rock & roll. But by whittling down Signals, Calls and Marches and Vs. to (respectively) four and five tunes each, they've robbed the individual cuts of a fair amount of their cohesiveness, and as an introduction to the group either of those discs fare better than this one. Accomplished collects some superb music from an important group, and you could do worse if you wanted to buy a CD by Mission of Burma. The only trouble is, you could quite easily do better, and this compilation seems a bit short on reasons to exist. ~ Mark Deming, All Music Guide