Track Review ⊙ Daily Ops Home
Burial :: "Archangel"From Untrue (Hyperdub; 2007)
"Archangel" is gray MIDI billows, a woodblock chortle, and saccharine vocals ever so slightly punctured, warped, and clipped; it's a little too sedate to be considered a wake up call to 2-step, so let's call it a resolute hand shake at the same time that it almost accidentally winks. Burial describes his newest foray into dub as more euphoric than his well-received, fucking mopey self-titled debut thanks to the "little bits of vocals glowing in it, flickering around and burning in the tune," but I think the end result's pretty much the same, if more balanced. I mean, the album's called Untrue, there's a colorless sketch of some sad bastard for the cover, Burial is still only known as Burial, and (on "Archangel" at least) the music's bed is as murky an undercurrent as ever. That said, this dude has great taste in rhythms, his compositions have a much appreciated sense of looseness to them, and the way in which he molds the vocals on "Archangel" (and much of Untrue) really is something. The pitch-bending remains graceful while it exhausts all options; the skips and truncates are thrown in sharply but without a hitch in the track's fluidity, like an expert drummer scattering little drops and rim shots through a firm groove. And what's the singing that Burial's maligning? Some poor sap begging "let it be alone" and "tell me I belong." Emotionally sadomasochistic dubstep has a new king.
Chet Betz :: 15 November 2007 |
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