Burial - Untrue

If I didn't have an unwritten principle of not wearing headphones while walking through Baltimore at night--doing so advertises that one owns an iPod, same logic as why I carry my laptop in my backpack instead of the IBM bag it came with--the next time I saw 3AM I'd hit the sidewalk with this album coming through my K81DJs.

Saying Burial makes dubstep is like saying Radiohead make rock music. Justifiable--but somehow doesn't quite say it. "Distant lights" seems to be a phrase that comes up repeatedly with Burial--in song titles, in interviews--and it seems to be the operative word as far as his music goes: there are lights, but they are always blurred, distorted, around the bend, over the horizon, in the distance, and here is shrouded in darkness where the beats drop and the lo-fi vocals chop and the synths buzz with crackle of static.

Somehow the man takes snippets of white noise and invokes drizzle of light rain in your hair and crunch of gravel beneath your sneakers. This is the sound of being stuck in the lushness of your own headspace. I think I tried to do a similar thing when I looped bars of granulated noise at the beginning of "Wish, Wish"...we'll see what tricks I can steal from this man next.