Burial

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.

http://search.insound.com/search/showrelease.jsp?p=INS29940

I passed this up in Hard Wax (they're loving the Dubstep btw!) for an old Carl Craig album & other stuff. If that Breezeblock mix is better... then maybe I'm not as excited about this as say a Skream or Digital Mystikz album after all.

1. Nu-Birth - Anytime (Dem 2's Nice & Sleazy Mix)
2. Horsepower Productions - Fist of Fury
3. Skream - Midnite Request Line
4. Wiley - Pick Yourself Up (Target Instrumental Mix)
5. Aaliyah - We Need A Resolution
6. Tricky ft. PJ Harvey - Broken Homes
7. Donnacha Costello - Dry Retch
8. Pole - Tanzen
9. Rhythm & Sound - Truly (Vladislav Delay Remix)
10. Dillinja - The Angels Fell
11. Hidden Agenda - Dispatch #2
12. DJ Shadow - You Can't Go Home Again
13. Johnny Dark - HCD 2

excellent rec, gets stronger as it goes along, def. hanging round some of the same old haunts as maurizio/rhythm + sound, which can never ever be a bad thing

Tim F is v.much OTM calling it a padded ep because there are (frustratingly) brilliant _bits_ on it. But the whole seems to fail somehow where it shouldn't have.

And it really would have helped to have had ALL of South London Boroughs on it because the title track would have been far & away the best cut on it (then Southern Comfort, then others) on a sound design level. The less Dubstep-y this gets the weaker, less atmospheric and menacing and emotional it feels. Yet the gauzy more ambient stuff seems to be getting the unfair share of the praise.

I'd have a hard time rating it below a 7, yet vast chunks of this lag far, far behind the truly effective parts in real musical power. Whilst never ever being hard to digest or bland or anything at any time it still ends up not feeling _really great_ either.

Doesn't compare even remotely in imagination to darker Tricky, Massive Attack or FSOL (circa "Dead Cities") or acres of other dread Jungle... If Hyperdub didn't exist and seem fresh & untested for it I'd expect this to have been released on Lux Nigra.

Fair enough to the 'burial' concept but it feels for the most part TOO hermetic and sealed around it's own foggy dreamscape to sound truly dangerous or threatening or unsettling. It needs more breaking glass and interruptions to "normality" in it I think.

(i dont like this much at all btw. tim's pitchfork review had me thinking it was the second coming of horsepower.)

Wow, I couldn't disagree more with these claims. Listen to Skream or DMZ if you want more fractured dubstep, that really isn't the point.

btw just to pre-empt dubstep (feeeel the bass man) purist

This there anyone seriously going to claim this? This is not a 'feel the bass' record, it's a shade away from a dubstep soundsystem track. It sounds perfectly fine on my home stereo.

But yes: Burial is in no way a bass-head record, whilst the sub-bass is present it is mixed well back, as there is quite a lot else going on. Check out Pinch for some real "holy shit that's a lot of sub down there" action...

I wasn't really thinking about it in that way but maybe I'd now say it is the second coming of horsepower and that's part of what undermines it slightly. I still love many tracks on In Fine Style but it's hard to listen to in full. HP were better rhythmic programmers than Burial I think (nothing here is as startling rhythmically as, say, "Pimp Flavours") but overall Burial has a broader sonic palette.

This is definitely the first time I've received e-mails about a review with half complaining that I was too enthusiastic and the other half that I was too negative.

All dubstep sounds fractured to me to a certain extent. Always tripping over itself and creating angular grooves. Skream falls into this paradigm for me - while he might sound non-jittery and so on, I think even 'Monsoon' or 'Request Line' would sound less so mixed into a different genre...

I agree, 'Boys Love Girls' is a 'fractured' sounding track. But it's such an exceptional record!

In any case, Burial is much more melodic and non-jittery than anything in dubstep or grime. The Germanic Basic Channel/Pole axis on the sound is an innovative approach I think. The point is to find a new synthesis, which requires reducing certain aspects associated with the London underground.

this shit sounds like enigma w/o the hot beats and tight samples. at least enigma is catchy and gets heads nodding. i forgot what this sounded like two seconds after i took it off. all i could remember was the afterimage of a train whistle, ghostly fragments of bad ethnic samples and the overwhelming aftertaste of rainswept windshields and sodium lights. fuck that, this is what you get when you combine corny dead poets gothisms + the sound of a deep forest album at 33 rpm.

Hmm... these are exactly the reasons why I love the record.

and STFU about basic channel, people. teh fact that a dubstep album spends time aiming for something that shits on it from a great height doesn't make it worth listening to.

burial is worthwhile because he namechecks basic channel? what's next, i listen to matisyahu because he's got good taste in reggae?

You can't be serious.