Burial: 'Rival Dealer EP'

Context.

I wouldn’t normally write two music related posts so close together, - this is nominally a blog about my visual art after all.  However, it would be pointless to ignore the central role music plays in my perception of the world, and just how much it leaks into my own work, both consciously and subconsciously.  Also, sometimes you hear something that just turns you over and requires an immediate response.  Enter, Burial’s ‘Rival Dealer’ EP [1.].

For some reason, William Bevan’s music just keeps hitting that spot for me year after year.  He doesn’t do that much, and seems to have settled into a routine of releasing small numbers of extended tracks in EP format, each winter.  Every time I fear I may be finally disappointed; that the familiar palette of sounds and air of profound urban melancholy will wear thin.  Each time I’m floored all over again by the guy’s ability to wring so much profound emotional mileage from what is essentially a toolbox of collaged, (and therefore, one might imagine, ultimately ironic or Post Modern), signifiers.

Three tracks in twelve months might seem a meagre return, but when each is so lovingly crafted; so full of changes of pace and direction; just so downright heartbreaking; - do we have the right to ask for more?  These aren’t just tracks of atmospheric beats & bass music.  Each is a miniature epic psychodrama and I’m not sure we could actually cope with much more.

The Internet will fill up with critics dissecting these tracks in terms of genre, current relevance, technique and P.R..  Burial’s addition of new tropes and motifs to his existing aural vocabulary will be analysed in microscopic detail and individual samples identified by the anoraks.  For me, this is just a chance to present some kind of subjective reaction to each of the three new tracks…

Response.

‘Rival Dealer’:  This opens with the now customary fog of sighs, surface noise and artificially pitched vocal fragments.  Darkness descends on another yearning South London Borough soundscape.  Then melancholy is shouldered aside by bullying Jungle-type break beats, seriously intimidating bass and a kind of looped, metallic wailing.  It’s not just large, it’s bristling and indignant; there are reserves of barely suppressed anger here, and the sense of long pent-up frustrations boiling over.  It feels like so much more than nostalgia for a lost age of imagined Rave communion.  This feels like what happens when the propulsion and sheer visceral heft of serious rhythm syncs up with real emotional damage.

Burial is no stranger to the nuances of layered crackle and hiss, - veils of elegantly draped aural texture.  Here, it’s all more clotted and overloaded than ever before and punctuated with multiple samples.  Over numerous stops and starts, missteps and pauses for thought, a trademark manipulated female vocal endows generic declarations of love with far more soul and significance than they really deserve.  Disembodied voices hint at crises of identity and of sexual confusion, descending, in the depths of the track’s most threatening Techno-inflected middle section, to the level of a rapper’s profanity.  It’s like being jostled and harried in a packed club where the dance could turn to violence in a moment.

When the aggression and bass pressure finally lift, we are treated to a coda of heavenly synth and stripped-in saxophone.  Phrases that should seem hackneyed, speak instead of healing; of something resolved.  A sampled voice declares, “This is who I am”, fearlessly but without arrogance.  Another closes out the track with what may be a Science Fiction-derived description of alien visitation but which sounds more like some kind of gift descending from the heavens.

‘Hiders’:  The shorter, second track picks up the lush, soulful mood of the immediately preceding movement, hanging it around solemn piano stabs, before applying what sounds like a brief passage of upbeat rhythm, typical of something far more optimistically Pop flavoured than we’d ever have expected.  In the track’s later stages, however, this gives way to a near-vacant space, almost bereft of actual ‘music’ and suggestive of deep, directionless anxiety.  It’s like one of those dark, truly forbidding ambient moments in a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack.  A voice asks, “…Y’gonna take me away?”  Another intones “Excuse me, I’m lost”, and it really feels like we are.

‘Come Down To Us’:  When Burial finds a way out of this impasse it’s via an extended closing track that is, frankly, infused with a kind of Baroque majesty.  It’s like the blending of slow R&B with ‘Air On A G String’ (and a looped phrase of Arabic strings).  In visual terms, this feels like a stately procession through golden candlelight and is a world away from the profound shadow and sodium street lighting that normally saturate his music.  It sounds like nothing so much as a coronation of sorts and, in its later stages, seems to ascend from Earth into a higher realm.  With only minor adjustments you could actually pair this with a soft-focused video and release it as a Christmas song called something like ‘Redeeming Love’.

That Burial is prepared to employ such potentially trite means of tugging the heartstrings whilst adhering to his own agenda is both amazing and exciting.  It’s as if he’s appropriating some already synthetic musical cliché and retooling it for renewed sincerity.  Somehow, this feels like a distillation of all the ways he has increasingly manipulated the second-hand fragments of a cynical world, saturated in urban dread and empty hedonism, to create a space where we might feel real emotion again.

The real kicker comes at the very end though, when a level, unprocessed voice describes the struggle to achieve contentment and self-acceptance within a trans-gendered life.  It seems to tie the whole record together and to confirm, (if we hadn’t already picked up the clues), the common themes running through this interlocking suite of tracks.  It’s also an account from life [2.]; a moment of moving, emotional honesty and, just possibly, the first time Burial has looked us full in the face.

Conclusion:

I don’t know if this is William Bevan’s own coming-out missive or just a heartfelt statement of solidarity with anyone who has suffered bullying or the struggle to establish an identity of his or her own, (and it shouldn’t actually matter).  For now, he remains as shadowy and elusive figure as ever, but this release does suggest something of a corner may have been turned.  We might all wish to stay forever in the familiar shadows of his grimy urban nocturnes, but instead, and quite rightly, he seems determined to push ahead, searching for breakthroughs within his music, and perhaps, his life.

Bevan’s public pronouncements are as rare as hen’s teeth, so I should let the last word be his…

“I put my heart into the new EP, I hope someone likes it.  I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to not be afraid, and to not give up, and to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them.” [3.].

[1.]:  Burial, ‘Rival Dealer EP’, Hyperdub, 2013.

[2.]:  The sample is an extract from:  (Filmmaker) Lana Wachowski, Acceptance Speech On Receipt of Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award, San Francisco, 2012.

[3.]:  Text message from Burial, read out on: ‘Mary Anne Hobbs’ RadioShow’, BBC Radio 6 Music, Saturday, 14 December 2013, (at approx. 50 mins).