(02.02.08) Coming up from the underground back in ’05, Burial’s first grimy garage-derivations (South London Boroughs 12″) barely had time to register before this sublow Soundforger was launched, blinking, to the stars (Burial – s/t). Plaudits came from far and wide, from the Hip’n’happening (Pitchfork) to the Liberal Intelligentsia (The Guardian), making him the first successful Dubstep mainstream-crossover artist (plus – interesting sidenote – Album of the Year 2006 in Avant/Experimental handbook, The Wire). A surprising popular consensus for a sound so veiled, so steeped in “non-specific sadness” (Simon Reynolds in The Observer). A pedestrian on the pathways of popular tunes this Borough-er may have been, but way too sub- for club and pub, this hyper-dub. You’d’ve thought…
But Burial isn’t simply Street. He knows how to mix up the medicine, how to meld meaning-moulds from music-matter. An odd mix of romanticist and postmodernist, summoning up an emotional undertow through sonic savvy. Post- is clearly the most for this ghost hardware man. Hear it in Untrue‘s subjection to being forever after, hymnal to the no longer there, elegy to and predator on the elsewhere-and-when. Sneaking into something in the collective psyche that’s not so much retro-, as hung up on nostalgia, morbidly attached to the remains of lost days, sense of place ceding to dis-place. This album carries a heavy emotional cargo laden with disses – dis-affection, dis-possession, but above all dis-location. The dislocation when you’re somewhere but not all there, mind strewn with residue, as fragments, come loose like space junk from the once-hedonic, come raining down on the near-anhedonic. Untrue‘s Now is chronically infected with echoes of Then. This, here, now, ever prey to that, there, then. And even the beat seems displaced from the body’s memory-feel. This beat is not in the least techno-tronic. Clunky DIY constructions, squeezed out from intermediate technology, renouncing the smoothings of sequencers, the quellings of quantization, slathered with strings that flaunt their lo-fi synthesis.
Untrue‘s mutant variant draws on the same templates as “pure” dubsteppers; a sound forged from recycled trans-urban underground sounds (the aforementioned UK garage, jungle, rave and house), like the acid-jazzers and dope-beats lot lovingly looted the 50s/60s cool jazz and 70s funk. But, set against archetype, Untrue‘s kind-of-blues strikes as differently, more knowingly, configured – in the universe it emotes, the play it screens. Not tooled for easy surrender, most of its rhythms are swiped from 2-step’s jerky synco-swing template, but rendered into spidery stumble-beats – not groove, but skitter… not cool, but edge… And Burial twists 2-step’s borrowing and bending of femme-vox fragments to make music moistened by the tears of house-ghosts – undead diva-souls whose wails and croons are excised, vaporised, pitch-shifted, adrift over rained-on backdrops, less empty signifiers than signifiers of emptiness.
But all will not be in thrall to Burial. You may find an Untrue playthrough a trial by virtual X Factor-contestant helium-warble, stumble-lurching clunk’n’clatter, topped with a maudlin parade of stringy warehouse anthemics, enshrouded in murk. You may find, for all its Urban Edge cred-by-association with ruff-tuff forebears, it fits, with not too many rough edges, into the Café Noir tradition of clubbed-out dub-trip-hopsters (think like it’s 1996 and “The Bristol Sound,” starring Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead). Burial’s update stows enough neo-ambient synthesis, Wonder-ing soul-isms and sub-broken beats for the lulls and longueurs of latte-lounges. You may even find you have no emotional investment in this music’s sources, left outside, chalking up the cheese, wincing and hitting “skip.” Still, there’s a generation or more out there for whom Untrue will be irresistibly vital and totemic.
Untrue is out now on Hyperdub. [Purchase
