Burial - "Untrue"

Burial - Etched Headplate (Hyperdub 2007)

Burial - Untrue / Hyperdub

I woke up this morning preparing for a frosty sunrise as has often been the case here in Chicago recently. But instead of finding freezing water tickling the rims of my windows and trees struggling to shake the ice off their limbs, I found 57 degrees and a peacoat too warm for its own good. There hasn't been a serious frost, but it nearly feels like an Indian summer and that can only mean there is still time for last-gasp albums of the year. It always seems to happen right before the American Thanksgiving: A left-field release emerges from the pastures to capture the imaginations of everyone who thought their top ten list was already finished.

Consequently, albums that are released in the last quarter of the year tend to be hyped up more than those in the first quarter, which remains the other big release date season. It's all strategy: If you go with a spring release, you risk people forgetting why your music was so good. If you go with an autumn release, you risk people talking too much in the fall and forgetting why your music was so good in the spring. Cycles are short and memories are getting shorter, but it's possible that Burial might beat this rap. Untrue is his second full-length following a self-titled debut in 2006 and many are arguing this is one of the best albums of the year.

One of the reasons people seem to be loving this is for the depth of Burial's soul-influenced melodies that one can find beneath the "corroded two-step" which has become a favorite description of mine in the run-up to this album. Dorian Lynskey is right in that this album sounds corroded, like it was made in the basements of a level on "GoldenEye." In fact, Untrue might be 2007's version of "GoldenEye:" Mechanical in some places, archaic and decrepit in others, at times dark and alien, at other times synthetically lit... And somewhere deep beneath the surface beats a heart that only lets itself out of the shadows in brief, fleeting calls to itself. In the caverns of Arkhangelsk, only Burial could make sense as a soundtrack.

Sure enough, "Archangel" is the first song on this record. It sets the mood that people have been so patiently waiting for since, um, Hyperdub's big release last year in the form of Kode9 and The Spaceape's Memories of the Future. It almost sounds a little like "Idioteque" meeting Akon, but don't be alarmed: This isn't the usual fare for this album, and if it was I wouldn't have wasted this much of your time by telling you Konvicted was much better. It's not. Drafty strings and gothic choirs swoop in on the chorus and though the beats may be buried deep beneath the solid rock foundations of UK garage, a soul is plainly evident. There is no official identity to Burial yet, but somewhere lies more than just a figment of Steve Goodman's imagination. That failing, Steve Goodman is a genius.

"Near Dark" echoes to the point that discerning "I can't take my eyes off you" from the chorus is rendered virtually impossible. Like the persona of Burial, the music here seems to exist in a vacuum. While scenes like Birmingham remain tightly connected and open about their work, Burial hides somewhere in London mining the deepest territories of dubstep for music that sounds impossibly deeper than his contemporaries. There were some in the dubstep underground who didn't feel as if though they were connecting with this track and after clips of it slipped on the BBC1 about a month ago, but hearing something like the air-raid buzzing of "Ghost Hardware" can't not be convincing that this is something serious.

Is it all done on a Mac from the comfort of a parkbench in plain view of the public in the best traditions of Banksy? Is there a secret subterranean lair where the most intriguing music in London is being made, or is that just time to kill waiting around at Elephant & Castle? MIDI beats, top-notch ProTools, who cares. The end result is that Untrue is magical. There have been a ton of other people to tell you that and I won't pretend to be the first. I also won't pretend I was excited about this release. Though there is no genuinely good reason not to be excited about a fresh Hyperdub release, Burial's gimmicky mystery and accomplished debut made it feel like the best was already finished.

As it turns out, Burial wasn't finished with us. Despite some cheesy moments ("Endorphin" feels like bad mid-90s trip-hop) and fat that could be trimmed, Untrue suffers not from excess but from the pleasure of being so good and, unfortunately, being released so very late in the year.

I don't know if you put much faith in New Year's resolutions. I thought about mine today for a brief moment, and though at the time there was no connection to Burial, in an abstract way they are related: When people toast to the end of '07, they will also find themselves toasting to a new beginning, a new leaf turned over to reveal something fresh with 365 days of infinite possibility lying before them in 2008. What better way to start than with a new soundtrack to symbolize this changing of the calendar guard? It happens that fast: Untrue will suffer the fate of so many wonderful albums before it, lost in the symbolic burning of the effigy of an old year.

So you won't be told here how good this is anymore. You won't be told how you should consider it in the context of the rest of your favorite albums this year. You're not going to be told anything. We will instead suggest that you play this album again in four months, in six months, a year, a decade, at your funeral, whatever. Untrue does not deserve to be, sorry, buried in the great haste to begin a new world. Tastes shift so often now and people's memories evaporate so quickly that it's hard to remember the surface of Severnaya from the caverns of Cuba. Burial doesn't have to be so fleeting. It doesn't take long for Untrue to assure you of its own Indian autumn. Best of the year? Maybe, maybe not. Memorable, genuinely special for its own unique ways? Well, that's all you can ask of a great album, isn't it. How ironic it is that few things resonate with such truth.