Burial

three paragraphs of deeply gross classist handwringing about the "working class" - do you really only see "wretchedness" every time you see someone in the lowest tax bracket? and i like this one: "they are given the illusion of education and enlightenment" - aren't you also culpable? why are you so willing to see the education of "people who work in call-centre servitude" as illusion?

followed by five paragraphs of blogging about blogging.

followed by several paragraphs of vaguely musicological nonsense:

"record looks and feels like something unofficial, unauthorised; an urgent samizdat, a desperate plea from an ending world, an artefact whose emotions are so necessary to communicate that packaging would constitute both delay and distraction."

dude, it looks like any techstep album from the early 2000s!!

"The beats are too shadowed and distant for dancing; this music is to be felt in other parts of the soul as well as listened to"

yuck, stale IDM rhetoric pt 9,000,000

"

anyway you should be apologizing to ME, i've worked in a call center and i don't think you should be calling me "wretched".

I'm wondering if the relative unoriginality of the cover makes it any less powerful if you're coming to it with a fresh mind? In isolation I think it's a great cover.

I think Marcello was just trying to avoid the pat, idiotic "this is more of a listening album y'know" staple than reinforce IDM cliches. Though they are annoying, I'll take the anything over the former, and I think the latter is almost dead for anyone but sheltered "alternative music" fans by 2006.

who doesn't use stale IDM rhetoric these days, vahid?

i second the faux-dubstep album - but isn't that what Various Productions is trying to do?

marcello you made the ishiguro sound worth checking out. it sounds like a zenned out cross between houellebecq and murakami.

Techstep did this too (this is part of the similarity) but the speed and the shameless use of breakdowns and climaxes gave it a sense of a broken machine spiralling out of control. With dubstep - slower and seemingly suspicious of the notion of song dynamic - that never happens.

The Dom & Roland Industry comparison makes a lot of sense for me, above and beyond the fact that Industry is definitely my favourite techstep album. I think Burial beats out Dom & Roland on the texture front, the warp and weave of the samples etc. But D&R beats out Burial on the beats/grooves front because, even when it's basically a straightforward 2-step groove (maybe 4 tracks or so), there's a real energy and intensity to the groove, a friction between the physicality of the beats and the lush mournfulness of the textures and melodies - when this is combined with an excitingly syncopated rhythm (on tracks like "Thunder", "Chained On Both Sides" and especially the peerless "Elektra") it's unstoppable.

It's clear that Burial can construct excitingly syncopated rhythms and on the best tracks that's what he does, but frequently he still sounds caught within dubstep's horizon of wounded undynamic grooves, like a post-Timbaland version of the leaden, lumpen boom-bap which drags down so much comparable downtempo.

OTM. i just cannot get as excited about this as other things going on.

Finney's comments are akin to criticising Saint Etienne for not being Menswear.

NB 1. I don't have an issue with rhythms sounding like broken machines. It's just that ideally a broken machine should sound, well, dangerous, rather than merely, well mildly impaired.

NB 2. I'm not saying that the entire album suffers from this, only about half.

can someone finish this? industry is to blade runner as burial is to ... ? artificial intelligence??

I suspect I am not being particularly clear here:

I think (and it appears that I agree with you on this perhaps) the beats on Burial's album are best when they're not trying to be obviously dangerous, when they're at their loosest and prettiest, e.g. the first proper track and the track with the sampled reggae vocals towards the end (sorry I'm not totally on top of tracknames much yet). These tracks are still pretty dark sounding, but part of that is due to the thickness of the arrangements and the slightly foreboding use of spatialisation - the way the sounds emerge and recede so boldly. It's also partly due to what Simon R called the "murderous panache" (or something to that effect) of proper 2-step a la Artful Dodger - beats don't have to be obviously doom and gloom to feel threatening.

The weakest beats are the ones which cleave closest to the current dubstep norm of a sort of self-contained hard-brokenness. These ones seem to fall between two stools: they have that wounded, muscly quality of techstep, but none of the sense of release you get with the best techstep. It's most obvious on the Spaceape track but even with some of the better tracks like "Southern Comfort" I'm left thinking "the beat is the weakest part of this track."

Actually the Dom & Roland album shares this affliction to the extent that all techstep did - there's a track on it co-produced with Optical which is very hard and very carefully arranged, but so constipated in feel that it never generates any interesting tension. I guess if there's one word I'd use to describe bad dubstep beats it'd be constipated.

(or, trying to listen to this stuff on an iPod is frustratingly incomplete)

Tim, you said that you found the beat in "Southern Comfort" to be the weakest part of the track. Do you also consider it "constipated," i.e., do you include it among the dubstep tunes that don't "generate any tension"?

(albeit shitty real audio may not be worth the effort)

I guess I wouldn't go quite so far w/r/t "Southern Comfort", although there's something about the way it loops into itself which bugs me - the variation on every 8th bar is better than the usual beat. "You Hurt Me" has a v. similar beat structure but I like the beat more (also it has those awesome, albeit too sparing "DROP!" samples).

I love the rhythm programming on "Gutted" though - even though it's barely there!

In retrospect it's only "Spaceape" that is actively bad in this sense. Though i could take or leave "Prayer", and while "Wounder" works it's not for the beats.

If it was an EP along the lines of:

Distant Lights
Night Bus
You Hurt Me
Gutted
Broken Home
Forgive

... It would be unimpeachable.

because his presence on vol 3 IS "actively bad", in fact it's terrible, and i can't believe people aren't calling kode 9 out on it!

not only is it sort of embarassing - would any of these dudes rep for "dj kicks: rockers hi-fi"? - but in this case it's just ... yuck.

"Victims themselves of a close encounter / Desperate abductors, constructors / Become an infected vex / By an alien virus"?

dude ... shut the fuck up.

Anyone that has heard Spaceape live recently in the UK will know that the line of argument on this thread, from carlin to finney is somewhat off the mark regarding that track. And I really wish people would stop constantly referring dubstep back to techstep. There is some substance to that contrast, but its actually such a lazy critical move to make the kind of comparisons, especially with the Burial album, which doesnt seem aimed at the dancefloor in the slightest.

A lot of early album "techstep" wasn't either! It's not like we're talking about Bad Company!

I also think it is ridiculous to suggest that its rhythmically better or worse than early dubstep. If anything it will help attract attention back to those guys, but its clearly taken that influence in another direction altogether. El-B & Horsepower's production was always clinically clean.