NEW BURIAL: YOUNG DEATH / NIGHTMARKET

As a Burial fan, I have to admit that I’ve been brutally teased by the dark, visionary, beauty-weaving motherfucker for about three years now. The last truly heart-blasting release that he made was around this time back in the ancient epoch of 2013, Rival Dealer, a cross between an EP and a religious experience, taking you down to Hell, up to Heaven and back again. It was more of the same, the same in this case being ‘cathartic genius’, but it was also a change in direction, and there we all were, cans round our heads, wondering the same thing: where the bloody hell is he going to go from here?

Since then, there have actually been a number of Burial appearances, although they’ve been teeny, tiny drops of this, that and the other. Remember ‘Temple Sleeper’? It was an oldschool braid-flinger decorated with the Burial hallmarks, and part of the problem was that that’s exactly what it felt like; a 1992 cut picked up from somebody’s cellar with the thinnest layer of that Burial magic painted over it. A surprise, really, considering his last release practically pulled you up beyond the stars and blew MDMA dust into the face of God. 'Temple Sleeper' was a drop back down to Earth, which was a direction it made sense to travel, in many respects, but I think it left everyone feeling a little ‘egh’, especially now Burial’s been hyped to the point where everything he does is given the same mad reverence as a verse of the New Testament.

Then earlier this year (unless I’m forgetting something), there was ‘Sweetz’, a Burial/Zomby collaboration that I believed, based on the combination alone, had the potential for true greatness, maybe even the same chart-topping success amongst narcotic, pretentious audiophiles as ‘Moth’. But the track was divisively experimental, a real out-there work of atmosphere and repetition that I understand some people enjoyed, but I wasn’t at all taken by. To me, the elements were there, as were the few loops and Burial fingerprints I went along with, but the almost seven-minute study in audial abstraction didn’t leave me truly satisfied. Once again, maybe I was blinded by the hype, but I found the release a strange disappointment, leaving my Burial-balls as painfully big and blue as ever.

And now, we have a new release, a two-track EP: YOUNG DEATH / NIGHTMARKET. Cool, nice, I thought; good names, and an actual auteur EP for the first time since the forgotten days of yore. The first thing I noticed was the shortness of the tracks; together, they came to about thirteen minutes of pure Burial, and all I could scream inside was “MORE! MORE!!”, but something always beats nothing when it comes to being a devout Burial fanboy, and upon listening I was glad to hear in these two tracks what I always truly hope for in any Burial release: a committal to the audial personality that made him a genius – you know, the intakes of breath, the zippo clicks, the track’s pieces bursting into life like rediscovered memories – and an exhibition of bold, new experimentation.

So, are the tracks any good? Obviously this is no opus like Rival Dealer was intended as, and it makes no claims to be. Instead, there are two very different creations here. The first, ‘Young Death’, is Burial in his most comfortable territory – out in the rain, with a synth as a blanket against the cold, and soulful samples guiding you along its roughly-beaten dirt track. The refrain is uplifting, and typically gorgeous, supported with pieces that range from subtle arpeggiated blips to the brief but powerful hammering of piano keys. As usual, the track transforms, and its second act is far colder and mysterious (I have to point out the jarring laugh of the Skull Kid), and brings you down until what could easily be the ‘Teardrop’ beat exits stage left. It’s tried-and-true Burial, but it works. If you want to step into an oil painting and have your heartstrings pulled with all the gentility of a lover’s spirit, then yeah, ‘Young Death’ is a success.

But what’s really worth talking about here is the second half; a longer track, ‘Nightmarket’. Immediately, the sound is radically different – above the clinking background noise, the human sighs, all of that, is an electronic fluttering of bleeps, like alien waves from outer space – a rarely heard sound for Burial, or, rather, a sound rarely heard in such a raw, electronic form; more artificial than his usual organic kind of style. It arrives and vanishes repeatedly, punctuated in between by segments of distant beauty or anxious nothingness, and the track just builds and builds, and its refrain becomes stronger and stronger, the voice turning from indistinct mumblings to graceful piano-like trills up into proud, aggressive synth stabs, with cinematic sampling creating a fucking hell of a buzz. There is no drumbeat – it is nonexistent, or at least it might as well be, and that in itself is a sizeable change of pace. I found it strangely arresting, and very, very interesting as a new droplet from heaven that I see in the work of this mysterious bloke and his weird, creepy tunes.

So is it good? Yes, it’s very good. Of course it bloody is, and it’s just indescribably delightful to hear new Burial that I actually enjoy and don’t find myself straining to enjoy just because I’ve latched onto the name like an entitled little leech. But is it really good? Hmm, well that’s tough to say. It doesn’t break into your life and rearrange the furniture like anything on Rival Dealer, but it’s unfair to expect that. What I do hope is that it’s a sign of things to come, something that will meet my unfairly high expectations and beat my heart into a slab of tenderised meat, but in the meantime I guess I’ll give the verdict as: great if you’re as obsessed with the man as I am, and parts of it, like the denouement of 'Nightmarket', can still smack you around, but there’s very little here that really gives your insides a good, solid kicking.