The Daily Spin, October 12
Burial | Untrue
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Untrue (2007)
Artist: Burial
Link:
Reclusive, shadowy, and mysterious - Burial has always lurked at the fringe, creating sound for a genre that saw its best days many years in the past, doing so in ways that build dancehall sound into music that would never see play in the club scene now, nor in 2007, when Untrue came out - but that was never the point.
Untrue, from the jump, is an album of secrets, deployed with abandon, the sort of harsh sound that can take your breath away. It’s uneven and at times a stumbling mess, but woven throughout are these incredible sames, high strings and vocal lines that, even if briefly, set aside the unease for a moment.
The clear standout of the album is ‘Archangel’, sampling both Ray J and the soundtrack to Metal Gear Solid 2 and curating a truly devastating tale of heartbreak and loneliness, the stark space of isolation mean in the way it lets the drums hammer and echo, but it’s true of so many songs - ‘Near Dark’ glimmers through rain with its warped refrain - I can’t take my eyes off you - while ‘UK’, down the tracklist a ways, is this beautifully sparse instrumental, the pinnacle of a genre dead by the turn of the millennium, having spun into grime and dubstep and bass house.
It’s this ability to freeze-frame and fracture around sound that Burial nails so utterly beautifully, and though it’s not always pretty, there’s something indescribably gorgeous about it all.
Rating: 9.1/10
Best Tracks: Archangel; Near Dark; UK
Worst Tracks: Etched Headplate