On the cover of the homonymous debut album by the band Consonant, a pretty Asian woman in a pink spaghetti-strap dress pulls back a red velvet curtain to reveal a black-and-white photograph of a room with an empty chair facing a window. There is a dusty clutter of panels and paper on the floor. The room looks as if it had been abandoned for many years.

Consonant (Fenway Recordings) boasts the first music written by former (current?) Mission of Burma bassist Clint Conley in more than 15 years, and the suggestion of the image is hard to miss: after a long absence, his Muse has returned. What’s surprising about Consonant is that, unlike the fading remains on the floor, Conley’s songs don’t strike you as in need of a polish. He’s picked up right where he left off. For Consonant, he has enlisted the talents of three younger, top-drawer players: guitarist Chris Brokaw, formerly of Come and currently of the New Year; drummer Matt Kadane, formerly of Bedhead and also a New Year member; and bassist Winston Braman, of Fuzzy. Now and again you may hear a rhythmic stutter that reminds you of Burma’s odd time signatures, and of course Conley’s voice is familiar from such Burma hits as "That’s When I Reach for My Revolver": it’s the best English accent ever perfected inside Route 128. But Consonant’s songs — in particular "Call It Love," "Who Touches You Now?", and "What a Body Could Do" — are less reminders of Burma than suggestions of the pop evolution that might have followed had not Conley’s Muse deserted him shortly after Burma’s 1983 break-up. No matter. She’s back, and we have an excellent album to thank her for. If the lesson of the recent Burma reunion shows was that they were indeed well ahead of their time, the revelation of Consonant is that their time is now.

Clint Conley is of medium height and build, with a dark complexion, heavy eyes, and hair that has only just begun to thin. He is the member of Burma who looks least like a member of a rock band; in Consonant, he ranks second in that regard to Kadane. When we meet up at the Paradise last Thursday, just before Consonant are to perform with Luna, Kadane gets recognized by a college student — not for being in a band, but for being a teaching fellow at Harvard University. Conley is married and has two daughters, aged six and 10. After Burma folded, he painted houses and worked as a roofer for several years, then got a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Boston University. For the past 11 years he has worked as a staff producer at Chronicle, the television news-magazine program on Boston’s ABC affiliate. He is plainspoken and a natural skeptic, and he praises these characteristics when he finds them in others.

Conley likes to say that after Burma he gave up music completely, and though he wrote next to nothing over the course of almost two decades, his retreat from music never fully amounted to an unconditional surrender. In the year after Burma’s break-up, he continued to write fragments of songs; several tunes from that year were eventually released. One instrumental track written during the period was given to the Boston punk band Busted Statues, who added lyrics and called it "Red Clouds." (It appears, with different lyrics, on Consonant as "What a Body Could Do.") In 1995, another of these songs appeared on a single Conley recorded with Burma’s Roger Miller. Conley had produced Yo La Tengo’s 1986 debut, Ride the Tiger, and he occasionally filled in with Burma drummer Peter Prescott’s groups "whenever Peter had lost yet another bass player." It was during one of these gigs that Prescott and Conley were joined on stage by Miller in New York, opening for Burma’s English contemporaries Wire.

"I’d never been to one of the punk-band reunions," Conley says, smiling broadly and gagging. "I’m choking on that word. So I was skeptical going into that, and I just thought Wire were transcendent. I thought the sound was great, and I thought they comported themselves with dignity. A couple of them had gray hair, they’re not kids anymore. It’s hard to believe they ever were, given the music they made. That was a lesson for me, although I didn’t know it at the time.

"When I came back from that gig — I’d played bass in New York — I was putting the bass away and I saw the guitar. And I pulled it out of the closet, where it had been for who knows how long at that point. A couple of years at least. Sort of strummed it — okay. Strummed some more, got into it. Fooled around with some old ideas. Found some fragments that felt good. Then all of a sudden new stuff started coming. I was mystified, really."

Mystified, that is, because he’d considered himself happy without music. "I was definitely content. I didn’t miss music at all. There had just been a pretty radical transformation in my life. Whereas once there was music constantly in my head — new music, little snippets working things over, like rocks in a tumbler, just constantly, obsessively, going over little fragments of things — it had all just gone away and had been replaced by [children’s artist] Raffi, for one thing. I’d gone to grad school, gotten married, had kids, and had a very full and happy life. So coming back to the music wasn’t preceded by any yearning or sense of loss. But I was always curious about, y’know, where the hell did it go? And I often wondered if it would ever come back and what sort of form it would take."

Chris Brokaw has known Conley for more than a decade, and he likes to tell a story about the trepidation with which Conley first approached him with the news that he was writing music again. "He called me up and said to me [here Brokaw whispers], ‘I’m writing songs again.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I wake up at four in the morning every day and start playing guitar.’ I said, ‘That’s great.’ Then he said [lower whisper], ‘Do you have a four-track I can borrow?’ "

Even as Conley suddenly found himself gripped by a flood of new ideas, rising before dawn to fit in a few hours of writing before his children woke, he still struggled with lyrics, as he had during the Burma years. "Lyrics were always my bugaboo. Why? I’m not sure. Perhaps just intense self-criticism. I’m a literary type of person. I read a lot; I write for a living." Although Conley is remembered as the author of Burma’s most popular songs, he recalls the words to them with chagrin. "In Burma, I intentionally slurred words all the time, because I couldn’t stand them. I just couldn’t stand them. I mean, I’m not disavowing it — I love Burma. Intensely. But some of my lyrics are awful." He laughs. "Flat out. Stinkeroo."

"You thought they were awful?", Kadane asks, a bit incredulous. "Which ones, specifically?"

"Awful? All of ’em except, well, I like ‘[That’s How I Escaped My] Certain Fate.’ Because it’s just plain language. God, spare me the Philosophy 101. And ‘Dead Pool’ I like. Again, just plain language. And people cut me so much slack. I just keep waiting for someone to say, ‘Y’know, those words, though, really suck.’ And finally somebody did. In some review I read recently, the reviewer said the words look awful on the page but somehow work when they’re sung. But at least the guy was being honest. I felt like sending him flowers."

Faced with a slew of new songs, Conley revisited an old collaboration — or you might say he revived another old Muse. An artist named Holly Anderson had designed the covers for Burma’s Signals, Calls, and Marches EP and their album Vs. She was also a poet, and Conley had set one of her poems to his own music for the Burma song "Mica." "When these songs were coming up, I thought, what’s the ideal situation? Number one, I’d get a lyricist. Just let go of that — not struggle, not torture myself into paralysis. She sent me a packet of her stuff and the yield was very strong: I used almost all of it. I said, ‘Gimme more!’ So she sent more."

If Martin Swope’s off-stage tape manipulations were Burma’s secret weapon, Anderson wields the unseen hand on Consonant; her poems supply the lyrics for eight of the album’s 13 songs. (Although Conley fiddled with the odd line, Anderson’s poems are reproduced in the disc’s liner notes in their original mesostic form, the John Cage scheme by which an asymmetrical horizontal text is developed around a vertical word or phrase.) And the collaboration freed up Conley to write a set of superb lyrics on his own. "Call It Love" and "Post-Pathetic" are both flashing glimpses of impossible relationships; Conley’s "plain language" is elevated by his concision and lucidity and underpinned by a slashing syllabic rhythm. It would be faint praise to call them his best lyrics since Burma, but even he seems to be (grudgingly) happy with them. "My songs tend to tell stories. They’re less poetic, less artful. ‘Call It Love,’ yeah, I’m really proud of that. I think that really nails some particular frame of mind — longing and frustration and confusion, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ "

Still, Conley had to be coaxed into taking Consonant out of the practice space. "I was concerned, at least in part," says Brokaw, "because I had asked Clint at a certain point, ‘Why did you stop playing?’ And he said, ‘I was never really comfortable on stage. I never felt at home.’ So I had no idea if he would want to play shows at all, if he was gonna like it or anything like that."

"We were coming up with nicknames for him," Kadane recalls, "and his was ‘Blueballs.’ "

"He definitely had blueballs for the rock," Brokaw goes on. "It was so profound. So we kinda just said, ‘We have to do something: either play a show or make a recording. We have to do one of these two things.’ He said, ‘Well, let’s do a recording.’ "

Yet at the Paradise, if Conley is suffering from stage fright, he hides it well. The group play marvelously — "Who Touches You Now?" stands out with a vituperative vigor beyond what is captured on disc — and Conley seems both gracious and at ease. Indeed, he had overcome enough of his performing ambivalence that by last December, when Consonant played their first live show, he’d already begun plans to participate in the Mission of Burma reunion. "I think his metabolism just increased as this all went on," suggests Brokaw, "he lost some weight." "My wife loves the music, and thank goodness for that," Conley acknowledges. "It freaked her out a little at first, because I was acting in ways that she’d never seen me act before. I was sort of manic. You know, there were some leather-pants outbreaks that really disturbed her."

The whirlwind Burma tour has only now begun to subside; just a couple of weeks ago, the group performed their final scheduled shows at England’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, which also marked the European debut of Consonant. "They seemed to applaud in all the right places," Conley says of Consonant’s reception. "I think they liked it."