1. BurialUntrue
The biggest thing about Burial, for me, is what he translates. I’m from Cardiff, and Cardiff was the most 90s R&B city ever, full of Jodeci and Aaliyah. I loved all of this because I loved the production and as a teenager, it made a lot of sense to me. Burial has a lot of the influences that would have been important to me as a teenager. I didn’t live in suburbia, so a lot of Britpop didn’t resonate with me. I grew up in the inner city, and I think what I love about Burial is his expression of that. The sound of someone having a party next door, and I’m not there, but I’m listening to it through a wall. This was a very real experience of having experience of something that you can’t really claim as your own, but you love it, and it gives you something. There was a sonic aspiration to it all that was quite melancholy.
It was really striking in my school, because everyone from North Cardiff, which is a far more affluent area, liked Britpop, and everyone from South Cardiff liked jungle, garage, techno, and gangsta rap. I really loved 2-step and garage. I was influenced a lot more by that, perhaps be-cause I couldn’t relate to the easy life that some of the other Britpop artists had because we were in a flat in Riverside, just trying to survive. But beyond that, Burial’s production is just everything you want it to be, because of its lo-fi-ness. I adore the dusty corners of it all. I’m not too keen on things that are too slick. I don’t think anyone creates the sense of urban atmos-phere and physical space better than Burial. The aesthetic expresses the meaning — that’s why it’s art. Untrue really says ‘here is the feeling’.
