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Burial

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Burial

 
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Burial
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Avg: 4.0 (532 ratings)

Reclusive south London producer mourns the passing of UK garage and jungle’s heyday.

  • We Say...

    Review by Martin Clark

    Throughout the last five years, a quiet, reclusive south London producer sat in his bedroom dreaming. He dreamt of jungle’s embers and UK garage’s heyday and mourned their passing. To console himself, he took the most rudimentary of studio equipment — a simple audio editor — and poured his heart into it. The intricate rhythmic and textural results became Burial’s eponymous debut album.

    By laying his sorrow bare, Burial touched people, reaching an audience no one would ever have anticipated dubstep — a dark, post-UK garage niche — could reach. What began in his bedroom in south London ended up celebrated in national newspapers and rock press end-of-year Top Tens.

    In an era of mass-access online music, while the "long tail" grows longer, the successful "head" gets smaller. Record companies are getting more conservative, signing safer and safer acts. How wonderful is it then, that an album like Burial can succeed without a press officer, hundreds of interviews or a sizable marketing spend? Dreams do come true.

  • They Say...

    Review by Jason Birchmeier, All Music Guide

    Burial is the first great dubstep album, legitimizing a style -- a generally dark, emotive, and faceless dub offshoot of 2-step -- that had thus far been confined to 12" vinyl and the underground club scene. Even though a couple of the tracks ("Southern Comfort," "Broken Home") had been previously released on the South London Boroughs EP (2005), Burial doesn't sound like a compilation of one-off productions to date, as is often the case with music of this kind. It's a true album, a unified collection of songs similar in style as well as mood yet also distinct enough from one another to remain engaging over the course of 13 tracks in 51 minutes. As if it were a well-selected mix album, Burial flows well from one track to the next; the exception is "Spaceape," the only song featuring a vocalist (and unfortunately sequenced third, disrupting the flow just as it begins). While some tracks stand out ("Distant Lights," "Southern Comfort," "Gutted," "Broken Home"), they're interspersed by low-key tracks such as "Night Bus" and "Forgive" that enhance the overall mood and space out the highlights. As the hazy, mostly black cover art of the album (a nighttime aerial photograph of South London) suggests, the mood of Burial is dim, distant, and rather dreary; from a subjective standpoint, one might characterize it as the sound of 3:00 a.m., a time of reflection and perhaps remorse, of being alone after the party's come to an end. There is an emotional aspect at work that is key to this mood, a sullen sense of despair especially evident in the ambient interludes, communicated also in the ghostly vocal samples. The technical aspect of Burial is remarkable, too. The album's subterranean basslines and skittering rhythms, along with its array of found sounds and production effects, are simple yet inventive, austere yet evocative. Other dubstep producers have crafted a similar style, make no mistake, but Burial is the first to craft it on the scale of a full-length album so effectively.

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