Burial Untrue

In 2007, mysterious English dubstep musician William Emmanuel Bevan aka Burial returned with Untrue, a second record of weird soul music, which lovingly processed spectral female voices into vaporized R&B and smudged 2step garage. Vocal lines are blurred, smeared, pitched up, pitched down and pitch bent until their content is cast adrift from their original context and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void. The album continues with crackle-drenched yearning and bustling syncopations, haunted by the ghosts of rave, but also revealed some new Burial treats with a more glowing, upbeat energy. Where the eponymous 2006 debut was humid, suffocating and unrelentingly sad, Untrue is less sunless. Many of the tracks are so sweet, they become toxic, underscored by the almost geological rumbles of growling basslines. Unlike the overpoweringly melancholic prevailing mood of before, Burial's sound is better defined here as a downcast euphoria.