Burial - Rival Dealer EP

Since releasing the unforgettable Untrue all the way back in 2007, enigmatic entity of genius William Bevan has satiated our cravings for his genre-defying and tearduct-assaulting brand of music with a collection of EPs, all brief in track number, but heavy in content. 2011’s Street Halo was a sedatedly rhythmic continuation of his famously dark atmospherics. 2012 saw the release of the religious experience of Kindred, as well as the cobwebbed night terrors of Truant / Rough Sleeper. Now it’s the end of 2013 and we devoted followers have finally been blessed with a new Burial release, and it’s as emotive and fascinating a piece of work as all that has preceded it.

Burial’s never stuck to one particular template, and if his music reflects anything apart from a kind of urban wistfulness, it’s the producer’s own mental fluidity, switching from one soundscape to another with a rewardingly experimental sense of structure. While it would’ve been just as critically appreciated for Burial to continue building tunes with the chopped-up garage beats that shot him to superstardom, thankfully Burial has taken it upon himself in these recent releases to flex his creative muscles, particularly in these long and varied extended play tracks, and in dabs of experimentation, like the sudden drops into absolute silence dotted throughout his previous EP. He’s trying a few new tactics here, too, heading in a more oldschool musical direction that I’m sure will be met with mixed opinions amongst Burial’s ever-faithful listeners, wherein he mixes things up with thunderous big beat in the title track, and dares to sound at his most un-Burial in the 1980s drum cascade at the denouement of Hiders. But I couldn’t be happier over all this experimentation, it’s interesting to hear how Burial’s been trying his hand at new sounds and new ideas without bankrupting that instantly recognisable sound of his; he’s continuing to change and grow at the rate of a continually relevant artist.

I know it’s fairly cliché to call Burial a true ‘artist’, but it’s such an apt way of describing his particular style of pensive musicianship. Burial tracks feel sculpted and abstractly pieced together like an audial collage, and he’s keeping to his own inimitable style in the broken, unpolished, dust-in-the-cracks veneer of his tracks. The rolling beat of opening track Rival Dealer, for instance, splutters into life, awkwardly finding its footing in empty space which is devoid of a rigid beat. There are several instances in which the beat fumbles out of time completely, which would be an obvious cardinal sin when discussing any other musician, and there are strange elements like the snare in Come Down to Us which sounds jarringly lo-fi, but with Burial’s distinctively fractal sound it only adds to his tracks’ crackly collage aesthetic. The moments in his tracks rise and fall with the fluidity of thoughts and feelings. Maybe that’s why Burial gets under your skin more than most, but it’s also probably got a lot to do with his choice of absolutely beautiful samples and synths. The choral synth that’s the main meat of Hiders is like the warmth of a church on a winter’s night. The autotuned lament that closes Rival Dealer provides tranquil respite from the dark urgency it trails off from. There’s the oriental loop that dances over the dubstep swing of Come Down to Us, and the gorgeously impure vocals that run throughout all three tracks. I don’t know where he finds these samples and sounds, or how he decides to integrate them, but considering the amount of time since Burial's last effort to release just these three tracks, they certainly sound like the result of real, painstaking care and effort.

We also have the unusual pleasure of being provided with a mission statement to go alongside this release, in the form of a surprising text sent by Burial to Mary Anne Hobbs, where he clarifies that there’s an ‘anti-bullying’ message behind this release, which is something I would’ve never expected and is actually a pretty awesome gesture on the bloke’s behalf. Although Burial has a landscape sound that can, at times, feel strange and dissociative, you can hear this theme of ‘everything’s-gonna-be-okay’ embedded here and there throughout the EP – in the triumphant cadence of Come Down to Us and the loving glow of Hiders, there’s clearly something inspirational going on. One of the first samples you hear before the EP fires up is a voice exclaiming confidently that ‘this is who I am’, and the album closes with a speech about believing in yourself despite times of hardship from transgender film director Lana Wachowski (of The Matrix fame). Taking all of this into account, even though the EP begins in the harshest darkness and the whole thing has an edge of night required in all Burial releases, there’s a lot more light shining through this EP than has maybe ever been witnessed in the mysterious tunesmith’s back-catalogue. While I, and a lot of people, adore Burial for his brooding atmospherics and revel in the cathartic grimness of the majority of his tunes, all his forays into new sounds and directions have so far been wonderfully fruitful, and the more positive shade of emotions which he evokes here are just as heart-shudderingly sublime here as in anything else he's made. Rival Dealer is a three-track EP that nonetheless feels packed with a truckload of finely-crafted emotional depth, and continues to show how Burial is one of the most fascinating and uniquely talented musical artists of this or any generation.

Burial - Rival Dealer