New Music: Burial

2007 has been a year of musical discovery for me. I’ve fallen for the warm electronica of Sweden’s The Field and Brazil’s Gui Boratto, as well as American acts like Dan Deacon and The Octopus Project - all of whom play a form of music I wouldn‘t have given 2 minutes of my time prior to this year. As someone who has almost exclusively listened to white boys with guitars for the past, oh, 16 or 17 years, I’ve been pretty proud of myself for this branching out. The closest I’ve ever come to listening to “dub” though might be the 2 times I’ve tried listening to Sandanista, which A.) probably doesn’t count and B.) I’ve never made it through anyway. This week I’ve branched out again on the advice of nearly every blogger on the web to check out a record that’s crossing genre borders.

The new record from Burial, Untrue, is the one that has everyone in a tizzy. After receiving Best New Music honors from Pitchfork, as well as glowing reviews from just about everywhere else, I decided to forego any preconceived notions I had (from labels such as “dub”, “grime” and “drum and bass” - not my forte) and checked it out. It’s virtually all I’ve listened to in the past 72 hours.

Burial is from the UK. That’s about all we know of him (or her - Burial keeps the focus squarely on the music by staying safely behind the curtain). The music is the perfect soundtrack for the cold winter days ahead; a distant and alien sounding collection of R&B vocal samples, emaciated beats and keyboards, and scratchy blips and bleeps. It’s so stripped down it sounds like it’s coming from some kind of other haunted dimension. It’s hypnotic and it’s not letting me listen to anything else.

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MP3 :: Archangel
MP3 :: Ghost Hardware
(from Untrue)
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