Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Noughties By Nature #98: Burial - Archangel

If I say woodblocks and Auto-Tune, you'll probably cry for all the wrong reasons. See also: it sounds like being on a night bus at three in the morning, standing alone in a Tube station, sitting at a computer after you get in and your eyes drying with insomnia and screendeath or driving back up the M1 in the cold and pissing rain when all that's left on the bridge of Leicester Forest services are tureens full of stew where the gravy has boiled down to evil-looking mud and bones stick out threateningly. It makes my sentences run on, and your blood run cold.

It's how it is, though. "Good at being alone...tell me I belong...if I trust you" could be the story of my life, and it isn't even a song as such. Although the vocals are unusually for Burial pretty much audible and distinguishable and the beat is upfront rather than crackling in the background, it still bears his hallmarks of ghosts, deep water, twitches and breaths. The echoes of the night. Streaking sodium lights. It doesn't sound like T-Pain, it doesn't sound like brostep, get those thoughts out of your head, it sounds like Blue Jam and your aching heart and rattling through tunnels. Bend, skip, bend, sigh, drop. Soul.

I'm never sure whether I prefer the first, self-titled, Burial LP or whether my favourite is Untrue, the album from which this track is taken, but if I only had to have one piece of music from this decade it would be this. There's a gaping cavern in my chest with a lump of granite on it pushing me down and this is the only thing that can move.
Penny Broadhurst

[YouTube]
[Album: Untrue]

1 comment:

Chris Rice said...

Absolutely spot on. I'd go so far as to say this was the best dance track of the last ten years I think. Not that you can really dance to it...