94. Burial - Untrue (Hyperdub, 2007)

Burial's second, most recent and best album is near and dear to me. When it came out, I was working my first full-time job after years of part-time clerical jobs and hating it. Freezing cold two-bus commute to the middle of nowhere. Fingers too numb to punch in the building entry code. Inside, office work every bit as soul-destroying as Radiohead and Ricky Gervais led me to believe the world of work would be. My job was to identify the sensors of a radio telemetry unit that were producing unusually high amounts of data. I then had to call their mystified, grumpy operators and try to persuade them to shut off the sensors in order to preserve server bandwidth at our end. I got yelled at over the phone a lot, and many operators flat out refused to comply. There were no blokes in the office I could relate to, and no girls at all, the only food for miles around a burger van that appeared on Fridays. My boss was my uncle and his desk faced my back. I'd come home shattered and do my unpaid night job, learning how to use cracked editing software on a slow computer and badly editing a short film for the Queen's Moviemaking Society. I was still living with my parents at twenty-two and feeling like a leech for it.

One day, a young man in a tracksuit stood waiting for the same bus as me, numb and slack of jaw. He was rocking back and forth, repeatedly slamming his arse on the outside of the bus shelter in which I was sitting, making a really loud noise as the Perspex bent inwards, hitting me in the shoulder each time. He couldn't see me. I didn't tell him to stop, partly cause I was too dejected and partially cause his rings looked too sharp. I decided instead to tune him out with my portable CD player and threw on my latest acquisition, Untrue by Burial. Knew it'd be good, but I wasn't ready for how emotional it'd make me.

I knew it'd be good cause I'd read an interview with Burial in The Wire. He was, at this time, an extremely charming fucker. Passionate about low art in a way that only high academia usually is, he had a patter like no other: self-deprecating, nationalistic in the way that The Jam or Blur were, searching for the potential in divergent experience from Mother America but also scared, superstitious, neurodivergent, culturally and sexually curious. He admitted he didn't know how to use music software and had been making everything on SoundForge instead. That revelation was mental to me and many other music producers; I believe it is possible, I believe it is true, but there is a reason nobody else would choose to do that: it causes the copy and paste button to dictate your tempo and makes aligning anything to anything a fucking nightmare. It does however guarantee syncopation and allows you to stop and start things with unexpected intervals.

Untrue is an album which causes many of its listeners to feel ecstasy in the brokenness of reality. It is hauntological. The short version of that very 2010s Derrida term is that it uses the culture soup you were raised in to frighten you and hug you at the same time. It had been in the air already, with Boards of Canada, James Kirby, Ghost Box Records and even Daft Punk touching those emotions. Untrue reinterprets the genre called UK garage. For those who don't know, UK garage (in this case meaning “adjacent to house”) is a form of club music suited to smaller spaces. UK garage is generally devoid of reverb, the drum grooves are slinky and there are often some chopped up romantic vocals from the girl next door.

Burial is pretty loyal to the genre, he's just a little off. Just as the ruffness of Jamaican ska supposedly came from musicians often hearing soul music on a weak radio signal and seeing precious little of what the Americans were doing, Burial is a raver who was too young to be an original raver, and who listened to pirates playing lo-fi mixes on re-used cassette tapes on Kool FM. He uses found sounds and record crackle and fire and film and game samples to interfere with the motion and the emotion. He doesn't have singers so like a lot of amateurs he chops up acapella versions of pop songs. At least four other artists on the Apple 100 list get the treatment here, their voices being pitched out of their original identities and their language mangled beyond recognition. Bass is tuned slightly high the way it is on a lot of garage stuff (and a lot of goth stuff too, an odd commonality between two very disparate sounds), drums are these shy little woodblocky loops.

When you combine all these elements in a sound that has no centre, you get this sort of South London symphony, a replication of the horrors and comforts of anonymity, a reckoning with the fixedness of the future and the potential of the past, dread as balm. Wicked, mate.

What Kind Of Splash Did It Make?

At first, not much. Rave reviews. Crap sales. Mercury nomination, causing the Sun newspaper to start a manhunt for him and forcing him to come out as not being Banksy or Jean Michel Jarre.

International word of mouth crept up though and it didn't stop. Shortly after Untrue released, vaporwave started to kick off with Matrix Metals' Flamingo Breeze, Chuck Person's Eccojams vol. 1 and Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe extrapolating 80s boogie rather than garage into similar emotional terrain. The 2010s were the most hauntological decade of them all. By 2011, if you went to an Urban Outfitters or a Top Man, every single song on the playlist had some Burial to it, along with some size S boy giving their best Radiohead impression on the vocal (Burial and Thom Yorke collaborated, but we don't talk about that in this house). Untrue refracts through UK dance music to this day like a dark sun. A few more shades of vantablack have been added to the palette, along with few more techniques for the patient producer.

Lastly, this album made me less broken. Soon after hearing it I quit that shitter of a job, moved out from my folks home and found a job in the exact middle of the city, with girls, food, and a walkable commute.

Where To Go From Here?

After an abortive stint as a pop producer, Burial basically just released an EP every year or so, never able to develop a full album. He hasn't evolved too much, but his work is more fragmented now, like pirate radio séances joined together with burning sticky tape. Here's ten good tracks from Untrue to now:

1. Burial - “Street Halo”

2. Burial - “Young Death”

3. Burial - “Claustro”

4. Goldie - “Inner City Life (Burial Remix)”

5. Burial - “Space Cadet”

6. Burial - “Phoneglow”

7. Jamie Woon - “Night Air (prod. by Burial)”

8. Burial - “Dreamfear”

9. Burial - “Truant”

10. Burial - “Chemz”

After that, get some old Kiss FM mixes on, maybe some El-B too. Read a bit of Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, watch an Adam Curtis doc, do the Caretaker Challenge.