- Artist: Burial
- Album: Untrue
- Genre: Dubstep
Pretentiousness warning ahead, I really like this album, apparently. ^_^'
The name of this installment is "Late Night in London" with very good reason.
Because when you listen to Burial's Untrue that is exactly when and where you feel like you are. This is an album reeking of a special kind of melancholy, this is how you feel when the party's over, and it's still dark outside, and you have to find a way home, unfortunately, you didn't plan that far ahead. Thus, the wee hours of your morning are spent riding the dusty, slate gray subways, and you ride them solo, or perhaps with one or two other people. Either way, party's over, and now you've got to face real life tomorrow, and you are not looking forward to that.
This is the kind of sadness that Untrue simply exudes, it leeks out of every pore of the album. And how many pores it has! The album is complex, one might almost say complicated. It consists of sparse, unorthodox-sounding percussion, filled-out by what I like to call Burial's Army of Ghosts. These are androgynous, distorted cyber-wails, that often change pitch mid-word, and they do sound like singing ghosts, they sing of lost love, envy, and other such melancholies. All of this is punctuated by that percussion, as well as found sounds, many of which sound like coins being dropped on the floor (a metaphor for something, most likely, but hell if I know what) and rounded out by static that sounds like it came from dead air on a shortwave radio. All of this serves to give off the "late night city" impression.
There are actually two, and I think, equally valid, ways that I've seen this album. One is in reverse. The later tracks of the album are the most danceable, and the ones that you're most likely to find playing in a club shortly before last call and the closing of its doors. From there, it progresses backwards, until the first track of the album, when the aforementioned city-at-midnight melancholia is at its greatest. Indeed, given some of the vocal samples, one doesn't wonder if the sadness here isn't that of the whole of England.
The other way to look at it, is to start with the melancholia, and see the progression to slightly more upbeat, danceable tracks as a sort of promise, a getting over of it, and that there will be more dancing in the near future.
Either way, this is truly an amazing album, and I hope I didn't just give anyone Hype Aversion XD
9.5/10
If you want to get a feel for this album, listen to: "Etched Headplate", "Archangel".
Comments
