BURIAL - Untrue

Format: CD

Label & Cat.Number: Hyperdub HDBCD2

Release Year: 2007

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €14.50

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"After the surprise success of his self-titled, low-key debut on Hyperdub, Burial returns with an eagerly awaited follow up album, ‘Untrue’. The new record is weird soul music, hypersoul, lovingly processing spectral female voices into vaporised R&B and smudged 2step garage. Voices are blurred, smeared, pitched up, pitched down and pitch bent until their content becomes irrelevant and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void.
UNTRUE continues with the first album’s crackle drenched yearning and bustling syncopations haunted by the ghosts of rave, but also reveals some new Burial treats with a more glowing, upbeat energy. UNTRUE kicks off with the skittering 2step syncopations and vocal science of ‘Archangel’, ‘Near Dark’ and ‘Ghost Hardware’, before descending into a space of radiant divas and ambience. While Burial’s first album was humid, suffocating and unrelentingly sad, UNTRUE is less sunless. Many of the tracks are so sweet, they become toxic, underscored by the almost geological rumbles of growling basslines. Whereas the mood of Burial’s first album was overpoweringly melancholy, its now better described as a downcast euphoria typified by the epic, muted optimism of the album’s last track ‘Raver’. Forget central heating. The radioactivity of this album is all that you’ll need to keep you warm this winter." [label description]

"Record of the year, 2007. As far as some of us are concerned, there's no question. Burial's first album was an eponymous release on
Kode 9's Hyperdub imprint and really came out of nowhere. Here was this amalgamation of British dance tropes (e.g. dubstep, 2-step
garage, darkcore drum & bass, etc.) into a magnificent exercise in mood engineering. Even though an urban malaise echoes through the
whollop bass-bin rattle of most dubstep, that first Burial record mined a melancholy whose dramatic power has never been heard in
dubstep, and rarely matched even by such downbeat experts as Massive Attack, Boards of Canada, Slowdive, or even Joy Division.
So with his second album Untrue, the aesthetic framework for Burial remains intact; yet the anonymous figure behind Burial has
admitted that he was seeking a "downcast euphoria." You know what, he fucking nailed it. All of the sounds retain the first album's urban dourness reverberating through each electron and washed drone. The hovering basslines which once stalked the darkest of jungle's rhythms are ghostly presences flickering around Burial's atypical drum programming, which by his own admission is done by hand without the aid of a sequencer. The clipped, 2-step breakbeats always appear as
the cocking of a gun; but it doesn't seem like Burial is taking aim at his audience. Rather, it's metaphor for the cold, inhumane existence in the grimy parts of London, where violence is just another thing to shrug at and move beyond. All of these sounds are clearly present in Burial's debut album, but the "euphoric" part of Untrue's intention is found in Burial's use of voice. Taking a cappella tunes sung by his friends (sometimes, left as a voice mail
on his cellphone), Burial has crafted an eerie cast of disembodied vocals, twisted into cybernetic R&B croons, all clipped and
compressed in the same manner as his pistol-whipped snare cracks. It's as if the human voice alone can transcend the dire circumstances of our earthly confines, even when the songs reflected broken dreams
and a dwindling hope. Burial seeks out the fleeting moments of beauty and raw emotion, codifying it through his impeccable craft on this very impressive and soon to be iconic recording. If you're not hearing it from us, you'll hear from somebody else: Burial's Untrue is the best record of 2007." [Aquarius Records]

label: www.hyperdub.net