When Burial’s Kindred EP was released digitally on Sunday, it whipped up something of an online storm, with reviewers (ourselves included) lining up to proclaim it one of his best works to date. More than most, there’s something about Burial’s music that seems to inspire ordinarily fairly grounded journalists and critics to start earnestly spouting metaphor, dodgy poetry and urban imagery. Again, we’re as guilty as anyone here – click through to yesterday’s piece on Burial the urban explorer to see why.
Inspired by all the talk of cityscapes, half-remembered rave dreams and ‘ambient garage’ in today’s raft of online reviews of Kindred, we’ve gathered together a few choice quotes, which you can read below. We’ll continue adding to this list as more reviews trickle out over the next few days.
Kindred, meanwhile, is very good indeed. You can buy it digitally over at the Hyperdub website. Its vinyl release has been delayed due to pressing issues.
"The half-formed voices and city sounds that echo across his recordings ask similar questions of their audience as a broken toy in an abandoned house might: who did these traces belong to? Who were they? Where are they now? And are these things left behind signifiers of happiness or sadness?" the Quietus
"The tinkling of glass jars being tapped, vocals crackling through earphones and the engine hum of a lonely road trip are just some of the visual pictures he paints here. The totality of his vision is one of a restless inner city. The city that never sleeps. Or indeed wakes from its insomniac fug." <a href=http://www.nme.com/reviews/burial/12732" target="out">NME.
"This time it’s overloaded with funereal synths and arpeggios that twirl frantically in anguish as if they had nowhere else to go, saturating the cloudy soundscape with particulate matter so intricate it’s a wonder all this sound data can be contained in a single mp3, nevermind a groove in wax. The fluttering effects are only further confused by the bleary smudge of it all, cinematic and grand but stuck in Burial’s world of canned frequencies: The locust-swarm effect of the filters is impossibly stirring, far more visceral than perfect clarity ever could have been." Pitchfork
"It’s a kind of clotted and autistic facsimile of dancefloor communion – not quite the elegiac mourning of rave that Burial’s supposedly known for, so much as a deeply alienated re-interpretation of it." FACT Magazine
"On the handful of singles and two classic albums he’s released through Hyperdub, the formerly anonymous producer has placed that love of music in the context of deep loss: from HDB001 through to last year’s seemingly out-of-nowhere Street Halo EP, a generation of heads heard that nameless rave—the archetype that’s long been the itch in Burial’s subconscious—drift ever onward toward its vanishing point." Resident Advisor
"At around four minutes and 15 seconds into the 11 minute and 26 second track, the movement ends with the crackling of a waiting turntable, or the crunching page of an old book, or a corrupted transition on celluloid. The page is turned; a theme found throughout the record." Artvoice
"It shows the artist as being, perhaps for the first time, hesitant, not of direction but approach. For the first time he fails to truly internalize the struggle that’s long been present in his music, the constant push and pull, the back and forth that’s been at the core of his dichotomy, the split identity of Bevan the day worker, and Bevan as Burial, the last man pushing the buttons to keep the moon in orbit." Sputnik Music
"There is a muscularness here that has been heretofore unseen, instead of feeling like a passive listener, traveling silently through urban streets, you feel like your feet are on the pavement, the danger around you, the clipped vocal samples are either the passers-by around you or the voices in your head." Mapped By What Surrounded Them
After reading, why not go and vote on the wankiest over at our Facebook? Please add any classic or archive Burial waffle you find lying about the internet below this piece:
