The sound of 'girl next door'Listening to Burial's music is like standing outside of a club while having a smoke: you can discern snatches of muffled lyrics and melody here and there, and the bass frequencies are so low that they are often more palpable than audible. His (or her; Burial has been extremely circumspect regarding any details pertaining to his/her actual identity) sophomore record, Untrue, is a logical expansion of the shadowy dubstep soundscapes on his eponymous 2006 debut, pushing forward the aesthetic that he and the Hyperdub label (run by genre patriarch Kode9) have helped define. The individual tracks are brighter and more varied, noticeably borrowing from Massive Attack's 1998 masterpiece, Mezzanine; they cohere more as songs than sketches, transforming the vaguely sinister atmospheres of the first album into distinctive moods. On tracks such as "Archangel" and the title number, Burial foregrounds more melodic elements than before, particularly the vocals, lending the compositions greater top-to-bottom depth and aural richness. Untrue is warmer music (Burial's preferred term of art is "glowy"), moving away from the bleak urban brutalism of Burial, and focusing instead on the inward self; there's nothing this records sounds like so much as a memory.
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