Burial (Burial album)

Burial
Studio album by Burial
Released	15 May 2006
Recorded	2001-2006
Genre	Dubstep, UK garage, 2-step, ambient
Length	51:24
Label	Hyperdub
Producer	Burial
Burial chronology
Burial (2006) Untrue (2007)Untrue2007

Burial is the debut studio album of dubstep producer Burial. It was released in 2006 on Kode9's Hyperdub records. The album's sound draws on various forms of UK rave music, including 2-step, jungle, and UK garage. It received critical acclaim, with The Wire magazine naming it their album of the year, and its being ranked fifth in the Mixmag 2006 Album of the Year list and eighteenth in the best of the year list of The Observer Music Monthly supplement. As of October 2013, it is number 391 on NME's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Production and composition

William Bevan was very much into drum and bass and jungle, and listened to these types of music on his way to school. When he listened to the song "Special Mission" by producer Digital from the first Metalheadz box set released in 1997, that's when he realized that, while he wasn't really a "musician", and even as of 2006 he didn't consider himself a musician, he could make tracks like these without having to be one.

Burial was produced from 2001 to 2006 using the program Soundforge. As Burial describes the process in an interview, "Once I change something, I can never un-change it. I can only see the waves. So I know when I’m happy with my drums because they look like a nice fishbone. When they look just skeletal as fuck in front of me, and so I know they’ll sound good." He also said that he didn't use a sequencer, because if his drums were timed too perfectly, they would "lose something" and "sound rubbish". The drums were a major focus of his while making the record, saying that, "I don’t find melodies catchy, I find drums catchy. When you have a bassline in your head for a day, you’re fucked. You can’t think." He also recorded himself drumming in case he forgot a beat he thought of, as he would often get kicked out of class for drumming on tables.

Not using a sequencer would also help him with making every track very quickly and focusing more on the sorrow vibe of each track rather than how he could mess around with them. He went as so far as to call musicianship an "enemy" of all of his songs and criticizing the producers he admired for going, "all ‘musician’ on me and just produc[ing] shit, not underground." Burial claimed he went for a sad feel with the album because it's what the old records he listened had: "once you’ve got a vocal sample over sub and drums, you don’t have much choice with the rest of the elements. It’s basically a Source Direct thing: it’s pure darkness but all the elements circle. You hear something and you know at another point in the tune it’s going to circle back around."

Music

Critic Simon Reynolds categorized Burial as a concept album and also said it "could almost be an audio essay about the London hardcore continuum", as it follows South London flooded New Orleans-style due to global warming. He notes this situation similar to the novel The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, a science fiction author who is a common reference point in discussions regarding dubstep. He saids that the setting of the LP is localized using titles like "South London Boroughs" and "Southern Comfort", which are two tracks where their "rippling canopies of amorphous sorrow-sound do for SE19 what Gas's Königsforst did for the woodlands near Cologne." "Night Bus", instrumentated with a "beat-free Gorecki-like waft of mournful strings", represents the sadness of when Londoners, after clubbing, go through difficult public transport options because they're unable to afford cabs back to Zones three, four, five or six, which are low-rent areas for where they reside. This gloom is offset by the romance and greatness of the city as seen from a top deck, "neon twinkling like a recumbent Milky Way." According to Reynolds, the album also regards the "keep-the-faith conservatism" in dubstep which Mark Fisher argued was a requiem or funeral tribute for the culture of rave music, an example being "Gutted", which includes a faltering yet stoic low-key male vocal sample declaring, "me and him, we're from different, ancient tribes ... now we're both almost extinct ... sometimes ... you gotta stick with the ancients ... old school ways."

Sputnikmusic review Nick Butler described Burial as "claustrophobic, nervous, and at times, scary", but also occasionally "gorgeous", like on "Forgive" which he called "heartbreakingly beautiful" yet "painfully minimal". Reynolds' review in The Observer share a similar sediment, "There's a simmering, suppressed violence bubbling inside Burial's music which conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on others. But there's also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire - a quality that emerges most clearly on 'Forgive', a beatless ache of sound threaded with the sounds of cleansing rainfall."

Pitchfork Media critic Tim Finney noted the beats to be reminiscent of the playfulness of 2-step, except that the rhythms sound more nervous than joyful, and have a fast-running insubstantiality that brings to mind the fear and dread of dubstep. Lugubrious synths are played over these beats, which Finney saids passes "over one another like successive waves of blue and purple rainclouds." He also noted this raincloud effect to be similar to techstep made by artists of Parasol Records sub-label Hidden Agenda or producer Dom & Roland in the late 1990s. Crackles of pirate radio and vinyl, as well as actual recordings of rain and fire, which Burial opined "would put most electronica producers to shame they’re so fucking heavy", are present on the album, as well as vocal samples that have been described as yearning and ghostly. According to journalist Derek Walmsley, "a melancholy tinge runs through the album, but the constant interplay of tension and calm, and of alienation and intimacy, offers the possibility of salvation around the next corner."

Release and artwork

Burial was released on the Hyperdub label in May 2006. William Bevan has said in interviews that he never expected anyone to hear the album: "I was buzzing, totally buzzing. But I had to hide that feeling, I didn't really have anyone to tell, apart from my brothers and my family - but that was all that mattered to me." The album artwork is by Burial, and includes an aerial view of South London around the area of Wandsworth Prison and the intersection of Trinity Road and Windmill Road; "That’s what I wanted. Epic… distant lights. I love this film called Nil By Mouth by Gary Oldman because it’s the only film I’ve ever seen anyone get London properly in it, which is just distant lights, down the end of your road. That vibe, but then sometimes I don’t love it."

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Robert Christgau
The Guardian
The Observer
Pitchfork Media	8/10
Resident Advisor	4.5/5
Sputnikmusic	4/5
Stylus Magazine	B+
Tiny Mix Tapes

Burial was met with critical acclaim upon release. Two five-out-of-five reviews came from The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey and Tiny Mix Tapes critic P Funk, with the former writing that "You don't need to know a thing about London's dubstep scene to find this cryptic debut the most mesmerising electronic album of the year" and the latter opining that with less impressive works from Kode9 and Skream released at the time, "it's apparent that this album does indeed have something special going." The Guardian's sister paper, The Observer, had a four-out-of-five-star review of the record by Simon Reynolds, who highlghted the nervous sadness of the record that he thought would hurt and heal every listener. Simon Pitchforth of Resident Advisor also called it one of the year's best albums in his 4.5-out-of-five review, concluding the review with calling it "a classic of sustained urban atmospherics."

Allmusic journalist Jason Birchmeier labeled it as the "first great dubstep album", writing that while other dubstep producers have built a dark and emotive style similar to Burial's, he was the first to do it on a full-length LP so effectively. Sputnikmusic staff reviewer Nick Butler disagreed with most other critics as being the best album of 2006, but said it would it be worthy of being in the top ten of a year-end list. Tim Finney, in his eight-out-of-ten review for Pitchfork Media, wrote that how the album "spins [many familiar music samples] into webs of torturous beauty" is what made it so compelling to listen. However, he did also describe it as "a brilliant EP padded out with sketches and noble failures", writing that its inconsistency is what caused it to be not as good as its best moments. Todd Burns of Stylus Magazine graded the album a B+, calling it an "occasionally great and always thrilling album", even out of the dubstep scene. In a less enthusiastic review, Robert Christgau rated it as a one-star honorable mention, writing that "Maybe [Burial] figured get your beats working first and later for humanism--or maybe he still had a ways to go in the humanity department", while citing "Southern Comfort" and "Broken Home" as the album's highlights.

Accolades

Burial was on numerous year-end lists in 2006, including being named "Album of the Year" in January 2007 by The Wire magazine. It was ranked number 25 on Resident Advisor's list of the best albums of the 2000s, calling it "a revolutionary record in the way that it influenced dubstep sounds and reinvented 2-step for an entirely different generation", while on Fact's list of the top records of that decade, it was number 22. In another decade-end list from 2015, it got the eighth spot of Complex's "Best Self-Titled Albums Of The Last Decade". As of 23 October 2013, it is number 391 on NME's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Year-end
Publication	Rank	Ref
Collective	*
The Guardian	6
Idolator	49
Mixmag	5
The Observer	18
Playlouder	21
Q	77
Stylus Magazine	41
Uncut	20
The Wire	1
Decade-end
Complex	8
Fact	22
Resident Advisor	25
All-time
The Guardian (2007)	*
NME (2013)	391
2004-2009
Clash	24
"*" indicates an unordered list.

Preceded by Lost and Safe by The Books

The Wire's Record of the Year 2006

Succeeded by Comicopera by Robert Wyatt

Track listing

All tracks but track 5 composed by William Bevan.

1. "Untitled"
   • Contains a sample of Benicio del Toro's dialogue from the film 21 Grams (2003).
2. "Distant Lights"
   • Contains a sample from "Emotion" by Destiny's Child
3. "Spaceape" (Bevan, Stephen Gordon) feat. Spaceape
   • Spaceape's lyric is almost identical to his lyric on "Victims", from Memories of the Future with Kode9 (Hyperdub)
4. "Wounder"
5. "Night Bus"
   • Contains a vocal sample from "Praise Ye Jah" by Sizzla.
6. "Southern Comfort"
7. "U Hurt Me"
   • Contains a sample from "Hunger", from the Black Hawk Down soundtrack (2002).
   • Contains a vocal sample from "Foolish" by Ashanti.
8. "Gutted"
   • Contains a sample of Forest Whitaker's dialogue from the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).
   • Contains a vocal sample from "My One And Only Love" by Bitty McLean.
9. "Forgive"
   • Contains a sample from "An Ending (Ascent)" by Brian Eno.
10. "Broken Home"
    • Contains a sample from "Dry Cry" by Sizzla.
11. "Prayer"
    • Contains a drum loop sample from "Sometimes I Cry" by Les McCann
12. "Pirates"
    • Contains a sample of Sean Penn's dialogue from the film 21 Grams (2003).
13. "Untitled"
    • Contains a sample of Will Patton's dialogue from the film The Mothman Prophecies (2002).

External links

• Burial at Discogs (list of releases)