Burial, Untrue (2007)

Where bought? Struggling to remember this. What I can remember is that it didn't cost very much (under ten pounds) and that I wondered if the person selling it me knew what it was, but for the life of me I struggle to recall where I'd have picked it up from. 

 
The emergence of Burial is probably the last time that I bought into critical hype and also think it was completely worthwhile (there have been later flirtations that have slowly diminished the influence critics have on my purchases). The whole 'this is the sound of the London night bus, going past all the chicken shops and out through the edgelands' and the whole interlacing of theory and Mark Fisher and Iain Sinclair and all that, yep, this makes sense to me and in some respects I can't move past that critical lens.

I've heard a track from this out loud at a viciously loud dubstep night in the Arches in Birmingham, and yeah, all that Hyperdub stuff really does sound like a different beast when played at top note with a super low bass set-up. But it's hard to attach any particular memory to that, so my own experiences of Untrue are imagining this London night bus (I'm not from London or anywhere near) while actually being sat at home on the couch or at my computer. Which, in a way, is pretty dismal.

 
All said, Untrue is still such a brilliant and evocative record. The 2 x 12" version that I have sadly misses 4 tracks that would appear on the CD and a later reissue: as I recall only the omission of 'Ghost Hardware' is a real knee-slapper. 

I'm not well placed to suggest where Burial might have been drawing from in terms of his peers, but I hear lots of strange potential influences like the PS1 game Music and the ways that the RZA layers and structures samples. None of this quite nails the point, which is part of this music's raison d'etre: to elude grasp, to resist theory, to be present and distant, to be physically here and emotionally there.

The record was only made in 2007 but the era and the 'serious clubber' it conjures up seems far more distant than 14 years ago. Part of this is because Burial's music is in itself nostalgic for the days of rave, of the earlier parts of love that didn't hurt, for a land of lost content as it were, even if those blue-remembered hills were in fact a £20 bag of bud and a new copy of Resident Evil.

It's still a great record, obviously keeping it. Not a fan of anything he's done since.