Anxious people might want to break out the Klonopin before playing Burial's "Ghost Hardware." Sure, the song's warm Middle Eastern vocal hook, along with the clipped soul-singer sample featuring the words "love you," hint at a desire for warmth and connection. But the crackly lo-fi production, the fall-off-a-cliff bass line, and nervous drums invoke existential dread. And those haunted voices hovering in the background act like a Greek chorus murmuring about a foreboding future, telling you what you already know: Love is an apparition that comes and goes like the rain, yet will leave the soil forever altered.
Burial's music has been called "dubstep" and "2-step" in electronica's never-ending need to subdivide. And while Untrue touches on the grimness of the former and the R&B underpinnings of the latter, Burial disembodies both genres, leaving them gutted husks of descriptions for a sound that's lush and minimal, inviting and sinister.
William Bevan is Burial, a Londoner who would prefer to remain anonymous but was outed in February by The Independent newspaper in Britain. He's a graduate of Elliott School, which has turned out popular musicians of all sorts, from synth-pop favorite Hot Chip to the guitar-soloing wackos in DragonForce. But if Hot Chip aspires to make listeners sing and dance, and DragonForce inspires listeners to bang their heads, Burial makes them want to crawl into a fetal position and ponder lost loves during the course of a long rainy night.
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