Burner

At the dawn of the ’90s, Richmond, Virginia, guitarist Pen Rollings, formerly of art-punk eccentrics Honor Role, moved on to even more challenging territory with Breadwinner, a largely instrumental trio that in retrospect could credibly be considered the founding fathers of math rock. What now has a name and 30-plus years of historical context must have sounded profoundly odd during the band’s brief lifespan, which yielded just three 7-inch singles, all collected here. Built around lurching lockstep chugs, unsettling pockets of silence and sudden compositional swerves, these nine songs suggest prog rock stripped down to its austere essence or doom metal gone cubist and nastily discordant. For all its knottiness, the music grooves furiously, a testament to the strange chemistry honed by guitarist Pen Rollings, bassist Bobby Donne and drummer Chris Farmer. The Burner runs only 20 minutes, but for the lover of avant-garde rock at its most outré, Breadwinner’s vision can seem practically infinite.