Whenever you look at the way things currently are, there is a tendency to get a little sentimental. I wish it was May ’68, Nirvana was the last rock band and football records used to cost 10 cents. So it goes. In the music world, right now, there is a constant spawning of new sounds which build from the old but say something about their particular time and place. We don’t need to look too far back to find worthy artists. At the top of my list for most important musicians of the 2000’s is the electronic music producer known as Burial. In light of Burial, that ‘Clapton is God’ graffiti is in need of an update.
One disappointing aspect of electronic music is how few producers make whole albums that you can listen to start to finish, time after time. Burial’s two LP’S, Burial (2006) and Untrue (2007) are exceptions to that rule. In both cases, Burial’s production is dark, organic, intricate and evocative.
The album cover for Burial (pictured) is an aerial shot of South London. Both albums really give a sense of place, of London. This is urban, modern music. The musical influences on display such as UK garage and in the choice of R&B, game sound effects and film samples screams city. ‘Night Bus’, ‘Pirates’, ‘In McDonalds’ and ‘Raver’, just from their titles alone, help to create a familiar narrative for the urbanites out there.
Both albums have a similar structure in that they combine ambient sections, (almost) straight garage tracks and step tracks which also contribute to the feeling of journey or movement. Burial is a darker affair with less vocal samples and more focus on growling bass and minimal step rhythms. Untrue is more garage, more vocal samples and more colour. The sense of narrative created is flexible enough to be intelligible to a Melbourne audience and to be taken up differently by each of us.
Other tracks, with minimal vocal samples, including ‘U Hurt Me’, ‘Etched Headplate’ and ‘Untrue’ point to a more personal story weaved into the urban fabric. Again there is just enough to give us some hints here, but enough ambiguity for the listener to see it as they wish. Literary critic, William Empson, contended that finding the ambiguities in a text was central for the analysis of poetry. Burial’s albums would seem to prove that contention in the musical context. And while there is this real sense of an individual journey or narrative, there is also an ethereal quality of timelessness, of universal urban living. The relative anonymity of the author behind the Burial productions suggests that the music is deliberately left open for ‘Death of the Author’ the notion that the author’s intention and own context is less important than the what the listener finds in the music – type interpretations.
The production techniques and choices, too, cannot be overlooked in explaining what makes these albums a journey: intricate but whole. The sub bass, off-kilter and complex percussion, stretched vocal samples, ambient synths, background noises and fuzz results in an organic warmness which isn’t often found in electronic music and which seems inspired directly by geographic setting.
All this is very good. It makes Burial a very good artist. But what makes Burial the most important musician of the 2000’s is that these albums, for better or worse, cemented Dubstep as a distinct, widely known genre in a way the odd single or EP couldn’t have. Of course, a lot of shit music followed (usual mentions to he who must not be named), and some good, but if I had to put forward an album to explain Dubstep to someone I would nominate Burial (and then Untrue).And this would be my pick even though Burial doesn’t quite sound like any other “Dubstep” or bass music. Burial’s music is a success in that it unashamedly wears a number of its influences on its sleeve and as such maintains continuity with certain UK music legacies. However, the elements are combined in a new (though not just for the sake of newness) and interesting way which is firmly of (and even defines) the time and place in which the albums were produced. And, with a small amount of hindsight, these two albums have proven to have had an amazing influence on the direction of contemporary music.
