Burial's first eponymously named LP is a masterpiece

I was slow in getting into the second release from that mysterious London musician working under the name Burial, because I was nervous it might fall short. That first self-titled album has gone down as myth and will probably be remembered as the 2 step masterpiece of its time. Its grey, melancholic sound field sounded exactly what it felt like to live in cold industrial cities dense with people, but totally alienating in spirit . But what's really, really genius as a tactic on the part of Burial was he took all the varying elements of that first long player and reduced them to shadow-form on the new offerings . It was like , as a painter would, he created a complimentary panel to the first LP, creating a kind of diptyque work. These are what you call ghost tracks, the echoes of raves past or as the Hyperdub site properly describes it

"The new record is weird soul music, hypersoul, lovingly processing spectral female voices into vaporised R&B and smudged 2step garage. Voices are blurred, smeared, pitched up, pitched down and pitch bent until their content becomes irrelevant and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void."

Yup. Things actually get melodic without being sentimental or cliched. That's the great thing about talent. It just keeps mutating right before your eye. Burial, btw , now has the inevitable fash cred. Raf Simons just finished cranking it on his FW 08 runway. Champion trainspotter, that one!