Burial – why?

Image of Burial CD cover - see description below

I confess I’m not a huge fan of Grime/Dubstep/Sublow. I want to be, I really do. I’d love to re-experience the thrill I had when tuning into pirate stations in the early ’90s and hearing Jungle for the first time. More accurately, I heard a bizarre sound (could it be real? was there interference on the line? what was going on?) that I later learnt was called Jungle. Except this isn’t a post about that music and I’m older than I once was. Which could be part of the problem, I know. Anyway, this post is about Burial who, along with Boxcutter, has released one of the first CD-length albums to come out of the scene. Why bother to write about something I’m not particularly enamoured of? Because Burial’s debut full-length is being showered in plaudits, garlanded with accolades, patted on the back and generally welcomed into the critical fold where its predecessors have been refused access. These eulogies are typical of the general reaction:

Burial is the kind of album I’ve dreamt of for years; literally. It is oneiric dance music, a collection of the ‘dreamed songs’ Ian Penman imagined in his epochal piece on Tricky’s Maxinquaye.
(from k-punk’s London After The Rave post)

There’s a simmering, suppressed violence bubbling inside Burial’s music which conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on others. But there’s also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire – a quality that emerges most clearly on ‘Forgive’, a beatless ache of sound threaded with the sounds of cleansing rainfall.
(Simon Reynolds’ Observer Music Monthly review)

And even my esteemed friend and Mr No-Nonsense himself, Sheikh Ahmed writes:
I’ve seen some ridiculous analysis of this album on the wires. I’m not going go down the same route (words have never been my strong point). Needless to say that most people are right; this is one of the most startling debuts in recent memory and early contender for album of the year. Think of it as an updated South London version of the Blade Runner soundtrack. Favourite piece: the searing dread pulse of ‘Distant Lights’.
(Fail)

Phew. Must be great if this is the reaction of the critical heavyweights – I even bought the CD…

On opening the Bookmat envelope I found the packaging unremarkable, its designer had chosen to append an Aphex-like logo to the artist’s moniker. The imagery consists of darkened urban tracts seen from helicopter level. It’s as unremarkable as the track titles which are generally purse-lipped and inward looking: Wounder, Night Bus, Broken Home, U Hurt Me and so on. But it’s the music that counts.

The first 36 second track gifts us with a hushed monologue that sounds like it’s lifted from a film. First musical track, Distant Lights establishes the template for what’s to follow. We get metallic clatter highly reminiscent of Photek’s K.J.Z. and like that track, Distant Lights articulates gun sounds into rhythmic kick (some of the sounds also recall Photek’s samurai EP, Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu). The gloom’s immediately pierced by an archetypal dub test tone followed by a sampled vocal that continues to swirl round the rhythm for most of the track. The effect is that of a sonic film, but it’s the very self-consciousness of its staging that ultimately fails to convince. There’s no post-modern self-referentiality at play because Burial is too intent on being serious and real. His aching self-consciousness discomforts rather than enthuses this listener. I also have a real problem with some of the sounds s/he uses, the melodies are painted with what sound awfully like presets.

Gutted starts with the kind of dialogue that would make me cringe in a film:

“me and him are from different ancient tribes, now we’re both almost extinct… sometimes you gotta stick with the ancient ways, old school ways…”

30 years ago maybe – Mean Streets, Scorsese and all that, but not now in 2006 please, it’s just too hackneyed – the equivalent of all those test record voiceovers done to death by NinjaTune. I have a similar problem with the two beatless interludes, Night Bus and Forgive – they sound like facsimiles of tenderness and mourning rather than anything approaching sincere feeling.

That the music is voyeuristic, exploitative and singularly unreal isn’t a problem for me. After all, much of music’s best moments are inauthentic. No, my issue is that Burial’s music is just too neat and tidy for it to convince. The application of digital textures to darken the UKG template feels clever rather than organic. Its very conceptual inevitability makes it almost unbearable. I never did like the inevitable. My suspicion is that Burial’s debut won’t endure as anything like a gold standard, but maybe one day in the future s/he might make something that is.

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Published:
25.06.06 / 10pm
Category:
music