Burial - An Alternate Career Retrospective

Born a few years too early to have experienced the heyday of the UK rave scene first hand, Burial’s evocation of the culture feels more like a dream inspired by an older sibling’s hazy account of the experience. The music presents a sense of distance that makes it sound less like being at a party and more like being near a party you weren’t invited to - a wall of concrete between you shivering from the cold and the sweat-drenched crowd inside. While ostensibly celebrating a social scene, the sound embodies the sort of dystopian loneliness one can only feel while being alone in a big city. 

With an introduction shrouded in mystery (the name William Emmanuel Bevan was only revealed after British tabloids forced the issue) Burial’s first album was to some extent a rehearsal for the next. Effectively a reimagining of dubstep as a genre, similar to what LTJ Bukem did for drum and bass ten years earlier, his sound had been refined to perfection, or perhaps more accurately it perfected imperfection. By 2007 electronic music production had become crisp to a point of feeling antiseptic, with digital workstations encouraging artists to create music by cutting and pasting perfectly syncopated loops. Assembled linearly using a basic sound editor, Untrue offered a welcome alternative with a warm and distant aesthetic comprised of pitched down vocal clips and samples from video games, muddled drums, and the persistent warmth of crackling vinyl. This soundscape created an immersive world, the impulsive composition presented a compelling journey through it.  

The album was immediately embraced as a classic, becoming a ubiquitous entry on most top ten lists and earning a coveted nomination for the Mercury Prize. The fact that the release was transformative to the world of dubstep is only important to the handful of people who still get excited about that particular genre. Burial’s influence went beyond that, though arguably not as far as it could have. While reasonably prolific in the intervening years, Bevan has yet to release another album, electing instead to trickle out various singles and eps. Whether this strategy was born of pressure the artist felt knowing that any follow-up to his classic record would be as heavily scrutinized as the Zapruder film, or simply the prerogative of someone who clearly never gave a fuck about being famous, I find it interesting to consider the extent to which this decision has effected the artist’s wider legacy. 

My sense is that when most people think of Burial they immediately recall the intelligent dubstep that defined his monotone classic. The disparity of attention given to Untrue versus the material released since has had the effect of encasing his early reputation in amber and downplaying his subsequent evolution. While the sonic palette and linear approach to composition hasn’t changed since that seminal release, his relationship to genre has become wholly inclusive with minimal house, trance, and ambient endeavors owing more to acts like Underworld and songs like Tessio by Luomo than to any dubstep artist I can name.

While plenty of producers have established formidable legacies through twelve inch releases, this is usually true of music aimed at dancefloors where singles become classics in the setting for which they were intended. This strategy is perhaps less apt for bedroom producers who are more commonly judged by their albums - imagine if Massive Attack had only released singles after the success of Blue Lines. Where Pitchfork heralded Untrue as the most important electronic album of the century so far, I believe its predecessor could have outpaced it. Greater attention placed on this more diverse material and the inclusion of collaborators like Thom Yorke, Massive Attack, and Four Tet might have opened the aperture on Burial’s legacy beyond being widely identified as a dubstep producer to that of an artist whose vision has expanded to encapsulate the evolution of rave culture on the whole, even if he was always on the outside looking in.

Track List

Young Death

Charles Webster feat Ingrid Chavez - The Spell (Burial Remix)

Mønic - Deep Summer (Burial Remix)

Hiders

Come Down To Us

Old Tape

Luke Slater - Love (Burial Remix)

Ego feat. Four Tet and Thom Yorke

Rodent

Dark Gethsemane

Indoors

NYC

Truant

Ashtray Wasp

Stolen Dog

Loner

Her Revolution feat. Four Tet and Thom Yorke

State Forest

Paradise Circus feat. Massive Attack

Rival Dealer