Oh, thank god it happened. The call was answered. a real, honest-to-god electronic ALBUM (read as: not a collection of singles to be skinny-jeans’d) has been released this calendar year.
Now, I have to say that not only am I pleasantly surprised but I didn’t see this one coming. A year or so back, when the enigmatic figure known as Burial’s self-titled debut album was released on Brit-label Hyperdub Records, it was a disc that got a moment of my attention, two handfuls of my respect and not very much more. What I heard in Burial (and from Burial) was a ghostly transmission, a hybrid of my beloved 2-Step (which had fatally bloated itself on cocaine and overpaid vocalists with delusions of US pop-radio success) and UK Garage, Progressive House and minimal Techno, all seemingly radiating from a burning alien radio. It was dark and moody without once ever venturing into rote, treading territory and creating new ground for all of its’ encompassed and assimilated dance genres akin to Superpitcher’s seminal Today mix.
My major problem with Burial: the facet of 2-Step that made it my admitted drug was its’ ability to bridge R&B and dance-though those vocalists cost the genre any credibility, they also proved the emotional lynchpin to the music. Burial lacked any vocals whatsoever. So, for all its’ greatness, for all its’ vast expanse of soundstructure, it mostly felt like listening to Music For Airports inside an echo chamber.
Untrue doesn’t just follow Burial, it perfects it. Just in the knick of time, in a year when electronic music proudly thrusts the virtue of bass-farting and face-chewing without spending a single moment on song-craft, Burial the producer has turned “Burial’ the sound into a universe of dubby, echoing bass, closed high-hats, muted woodblocks and silken, Special Dark vocals.
It sounds naive and plebeian to suggest that the missing ingredient from the first Burial album is the human voice, and after listening to Burial and Untrue back-to-back it becomes apparent there’s both a case for and a case against that frame of thought. While if Untrue had never existed Burial wouldn’t be given a second thought, it is true that when placed in chronological context, the first album feels like a stranded hour of stark and epic loneliness, so much so that the first trickle of voice on Untrue comes across like the oldest friend-until it becomes apparent that it is, in fact, trying to break your heart, a task on which Untrue succeeds too many times to count within its’ hour running time.
Manipulating his drowned take on northern soul songs, pitch-shifting and vocoding to levels of gender neutrality, Burial’s otherworldly electronic love-lorn soul ballads (which, ultimately, is what this album is a collection of) sound ghostly and immediate, a specter of memory. Whereas Telefon Tel Aviv, on Map Of What Is Effortless (one of my favorite wrist-slitting albums of all time, ever) placed their heartbreaking singers and their heartbroken songs upfront, Burial drowns the voices, drowns the ghosts, drowns the pain-in static, in reverb, at times even in silence-and the result is that much more compelling.
It’s easy, really, to underestimate the sheer genius (and sheer beauty) of Untrue when immersed in the first half, all of which centers around the loss of love. Once the title track takes over mid-way through, though, it’s evident that Burial’s crafted something specific: a study in the ways love and the lack of such influence everything, from the color of the sky to the sound of the wind. The dual-pairing, then, of “Untrue” and “Shell Of Light” is like kissing wet stone: reinvigorating, reviving, a reminder of all things human and all things natural. I challenge anyone to find something more gorgeous on any electronic production this year.
Untrue closes mostly restorative, with half-light giving away to a darkened warehouse in the aptly-titled “Raver”, the album’s most (read as: only) uplifting moment. It’s fitting, because as Untrue closes it’s impossible not to think back to “Archangel” and its bleakness, the hopeless beauty of the album’s beginning, the vital, impressive restoration that is the middle and the reminder of small constants-breathing, smiling, days turning into one another-that comes from the ending.
Untrue is an album, a masterful one at that, one that’s earning praise left and right cross-genre for being what it is: a quenching rain in a music landscape desperate for something authentic, emotive and real. This is gonna fight tooth-and-nail for my top album spot of 07.
A true masterpiece of aching soul, the closest approximation of the epic, lost feel of the entire album that can be distilled into one select song.
Untrue’s very real, very intense turning point. I’m not going to sully this with words: hit “play” and close your eyes.
Bloc Party: Where Is Home (Burial remix)
It’s amazing, what happens when this is left in an iTunes playlist to appear as though it’s attached to Untrue: it fits, Kele’s vocal given the drowned-treatment and the U2-aping of the original album version turned inside itself. The Untrue version makes this true, so to speak.
You can buy any and all of this stuff at Boomkat, who, honestly, are cooler than any of the other music stores we could possibly link to when it comes to cutting-edge electronic stuff. I also can’t recommend to you enough that you sign up for their weekly newsletter: you may *think* you know what’s going on, but unless you see what they’re plugging every Friday, you really don’t.
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