Burial - Young Death / Nightmarket

Pitchfork 69

In the years following the 2007 release of the most recent Burial album, Untrue, we barely heard from the London producer born William Bevan. There was a 12” a couple of years later that found him collaborating with Four Tet, but nothing in terms of solo material until the 2011 EP Street Halo. With that release, what seemed at first to be a diversion until the next full-length came along turned out to be something more significant: Burial was shaping his music to fit a new format and finding inspiration in its limitations.

The 12” vinyl EP, with a total playing time in the range of 20 to 30 minutes, proved to be the ideal canvas for new Burial creations. When no longer charged with sustaining a mood for LP length, he was able to pack more sounds and ideas into smaller spaces, incorporating rhythms from across the dance music spectrum and becoming more deft in his use of voices along the way. As important as Untrue may be to the recent history of electronic music, his EPs contain some of his finest work.

The 12”s became annual “event” records that seemed all-too-happy to slip back into the ether; the last two, 2013’s Rival Dealer and 2012’s Truant/Rough Sleeper, came out in during the sleepy release month of December, after the year-end lists had been compiled, and when a new year of music was just around the corner. December ’14 and ’15 brought precious little Burial music, but then Black Friday brought a surprise in the form of a new Hyperdub 12”, “Young Death” b/w “Nightmarket.”

It’s not quite fair to compare this record to the last four EPs, if only because this release is considerably shorter at 13 minutes. But the record feels comparatively minor in other ways. Each of the last few records introduced a new twist to the project, whether production density or a 4/4 house thump or an extra-musical idea, like the touching statement that Rival Dealer was designed as a balm for people subjected to bullying. As they arrived in succession, it was uncanny how much more Bevan could squeeze out of the narrow parameters of his style. But this 12” finds the project in a lull; it sounds like Burial (ghostly voices, clattering metal, vinyl crackle, funeral keyboard lines, all present and accounted for), which means it reaches a certain threshold for dark atmospheric beauty, but there’s very little to distinguish it otherwise.

Beats for the two tracks are almost non-existent, which might suggest that the intention is something closer to ambient music, but the songs don’t stick around long enough to be immersive. “Young Death” features a lovely repeating vocal bit featuring the phrase “I will always be there for you,” underscoring the fact that warmth and empathy were always at the heart of the Burial project, but the voice floats freely, never connecting to its surroundings. “Nightmarket” is a touch more engaging and adds some jittery John Carpenter-style keyboard textures, but it too feels like it’s gathering itself for something that never arrives. Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion.