L. B. Dub Corp is techno veteran Luke Slater. “Only the Good Times” is a warm but chilled, wistful but feel-good piece. A nostalgic reminiscence of, well, “Only the Good Times”. The synth riff is like a cinema Wurlitzer heard through fog. A magnificent track. Burial’s remix is more than twice the length – in excess of ten minutes as seems often to be the case. The part of the vocal used is de-genderised by raising the pitch, but stretching it so the duration is the same. There is a muffled kick drum rhythm that threatens to take off, but never really builds, and the original synth melody finally comes in as a coda in the final minute. It’s effortlessly transformed into a Burial track, but on this occasion the emotion of Slater’s superb original is lost.
Tag Archives: Burial
Burial – Dreamfear / Boy Sent from Above (XL)
With Antidawn and Streetlands Burial was slipping away into a ghostly netherworld of disturbed dreams and eerie nocturnal somnambulance. They were records to play in the early hours on a dark, damp and still night: records that were as gossamer thin as they were dark. And brilliant though they were, I missed the visceral, scratchy, clunky feel of the old Burial. This EP (two thirteen minute tracks) is a return to noise. The Burial trademarks of nearly two decades are present and correct: hissing static, metallic clangs, distorted voices pitched upwards, downwards and sideways. Somehow this never gets old, though. “Dreamfear” is a collage of noise, hard beats, more noise, more beats, oases of quiet, and more thumping beats. It’s brutally, almost shambolically edited, but runs through its alotted time quickly. An absolute banger, a distorted techno nightmare. “Boy Sent from Above” has rounder edges, a richer synth based sound, and jumps about less. It still goes at a pace, almost Burial does EDM. And both tracks retain that underlying feel of deep sadness, dislocation, and the sense of being lost. It’s a monster of an EP. Whether this is a one-off for XL, or a new phase time alone will tell. For me “Boy Sent from Above” is as good as anything Will has done since Rival Dealer a decade ago. And that is very very good indeed
General blether
I’m going to be away from my computer for a week so there’s going to be nothing doing re: the review pile for that period. I have got the backlog down to a dozen or so things.
One or two things I like:
Jamie Woon’s new single “Night Air” is one of the best songs I’ve heard in a long while. It’s a kind of mix between an R&B/pop tune and something far darker and ghostly. It’s a good song – definitely daytime radio material, but underneath there is something quite different going on with a haunted guitar strum and all manner of half-buried murmurings. It wasn’t really a surprise to learn that he’s a mate of Burial’s. There’s definitely that hallmark.
It’s been around a while, but James Blake’s CMYK still does the business for me.
Mary Anne Hobbs has her final show on Radio One on Thursday 9th. Let’s hope they fill the slot with something leftfield and forward thinking. She’ll be missed. She has a very special guest on her final show whose identity is shrouded in secrecy. Pure speculation on my part. But maybe it’s this chap (not Four Tet):
I can’t think who else she would be so mysterious about.
The Scum
So Burial reveals himself to pre-empt those disgusting fuckwads at the Sun. Like it should fucking matter who he is. For those who don’t know, that piece of diseased shit laughingly called a newspaper set up a premium rate phone line for people to call to reveal his identity. So he outed himself on his MySpace site (also owned by that turd Murdoch – oh irony of ironies) to get them off his back.
Still, I suppose it was naive of Hyperdub to nominate the record for selection and not to expect some kind of hoo-ha to ensue. Let’s hope the jackals stay off his back.
On the plus side, he says he’s got a new twelve ready for release and is busy working on his third album. That’s the important stuff.
Albums of the year: Top 3
Before the trumpets sound and the drums roll, here are a few things that could have made the top thirty, but didn’t owing to the fact that I haven’t yet heard them! But all are high on my “to hear” list in 2008:
ARVE HENRIKSEN: Strjon; MISTICAL: The Eleventh Hour; WILLIAM BASINSKI: Short Wave Music; ALVA NOTO: Xerrox Volume 1; BJ NILSEN: The Short Night; ALEKSI PERALA: Project V; LUKE VIBERT: Chicago, Redruth, Detroit; BUGGE WESSELTOFT: Im. And those are just some that I know about.
Compilations / Reissues: The continuing Motown series gets better and better. Volume 9 is out soon covering 1969 over six discs. Best reissue for me was Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Englaborn – it would have made my top ten with ease if I’d deemed it eligible.
OK. On to my top trio. They were easy to pick, but not so easy to order – particularly the top two.
Ignore the last paragraph of my review. I got a little overexcited and carried away. That said, Cosmos is a seriously good suite of music. The two title tracks are particularly remarkable – long drawn out drones constructed out of snippets of orchestral samples, like particles of dead sound coalescing around a new core, and reawakening. Or something like that.
In a true pessimist’s fashion I was prepared to be disappointed by this. Burial’s debut album was so remarkable, that I couldn’t see how it could be matched. Even the early reviews attesting to its greatness failed to sway me – how many times have people, who were late to a debut album, heaped praise on its ropey successor, simply because they weren’t there for the first? Then a couple of years later, everyone’s embarassed about it, and all pretend that they always thought it was rubbish. I call it Arcade Fire syndrome (Neon Bible really is pants – overblown, self-important pants at that).
I digress. I heard “Ghost Hardware” before the rest of the album. I was convinced then, and I’m convinced now. Untrue not only matches the first album, it betters it. And it does so by taking the music into a completely new direction, whilst deepening the mood of dislocation, and confused melancholy. If your instinctive reaction is to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction at the first whiff of hype, then you’re like me. But sometimes what seems like hype is just collective enthusiasm. Rarely, but it’s definitely the case with Burial.
1. STARS OF THE LID: And The Refinement Of Their Decline
On the face of it, this is two hours of drones over two CDs (three LPs), occasionally enlivened by snippets of melody from a lone piano or clarinet. The pace is not so much glacial as geological. This isn’t music in a hurry. Stars Of The Lid share a kind of narcotic quality with Burial. With the latter, it is a twitchy, fugged mind, tired but not sleepy kind of state. With Stars Of The Lid, all is calm, and the mind drifts into a warm coccoon of semi-consciousness. Every now and then, there is a heartbreaking melody on piano, cello, clarinet, that breaks through the comfort like glimpses of past regrets. This isn’t mellow, chill-out music. There is a deep sadness about it that can be emotionally exhausting, but also cathartic. It’s also very, very beautiful.
Album: BURIAL – Untrue (Hyperdub HDBCD002 2007)
Untrue must have been one of the most anticipated releases of the year. Burial’s debut was my favourite album of 2006, and I was far from alone. It was The Wire’s record of the year, and even made the top thirty in hoary old Dadrock bible Uncut. Burial faced the familiar second record syndrome – following a first collection of years’ worth of tracks with something created from scratch in a much shorter period, and without repeating himself.
Untrue is much less eclectic than the debut. There is no real equivalent to the heartbreaking ambience of “Night Bus”, nor anything like the quasi-rap of “Space Ape”. The tracks follow a rough template of jagged, distressed looped beats, atmospheric tones, extraneous surface noise, grumbling bass and sampled voices. Everything is spectral and disconnected, with unrelated snippets of song drifting in and out each tune. Burial is an apt moniker, because it sounds like a carnival of ghosts escaped from long lost house, soul, garage and hardcore tunes.
Burial himself has described the collection as more upbeat – but Untrue is a long way from a bunch of Day-Glo rave tunes (“Raver”, a kind of somnambulant trance anthem, is as close as it gets to wave-your-hands-in-the-air, four to the floor euphoria. And that’s not very close). Everything feels dislocated, and somehow lost like mixed up dreams and memories blurring reality and something merely imagined. First time I listened to the record I’d had a few beers, and it was a particularly woozy experience. The second time I was stone cold sober, but it was still just as oddly disconnected.
Picking out highlights from a record like this is difficult. Each track sounds utterly fantastic played alone, but there is a cumulative narcotic effect that comes from listening to the whole thing. The beats may not have the juddering force of Vex’d – in fact they’re pretty simplistic – but this is music designed for the brain and the heart, not the feet. Sonically it has as much in common as My Bloody Valentine, Boards of Canada and Stars of the Lid as it does with any dubstep contemporaries.
Burial’s desire to remain anonymous may have been hooked into by a media who have to have some kind of ‘angle’ to everything. It scarcely matters who he is. The music stands alone as some of the most original made by anyone for years. The fact that it combines this originality with such a heady emotional power almost defies belief. Untrue is unequivocally a masterpiece.
Tracks
1 Untitled (0:45)
2 Archangel (3:59)
3 Near Dark (3:53)
4 Ghost Hardware (4:54)
5 Endorphin (2:57)
6 Etched Headplate (6:00)
7 In McDonalds (2:09)
8 Untrue (6:16)
9 Shell Of Light (4:41)
10 Dog Shelter (2:58)
11 Homeless (5:26)
12 UK (1:42)
13 Raver (4:58)
Website
www.hyperdub.net
Music Musings and Miscellany 