- Ten years on, Untrue's place in the canon is assured. It must be nice having a modern masterpiece to your name, but it also throws up problems: where do you go next? Burial has explored a few paths with mixed success. There were the big-room gestures of Rival Dealer and Kindred, which risked drowning in schmaltz, and the ambient Subtemple and Young Death / Nightmarket. The recent "Rodent" was more dance floor-friendly, but without the crackly intrigue. Another route involves ditching the sweet, redemptive mood—Kode9 called this the "audio duvet"—that has helped make Burial's music such a lasting favourite. Following 2015's paranoid "Temple Sleeper," Pre Dawn / Indoors probes this idea further. The result is far from the weepy Untrue, but as new directions go it's not half bad.
Burial's tracks tend to evoke narratives around the club rather than inviting club use themselves. The same goes for "Pre Dawn," which depicts one of those semi-coherent nights out that picks up a terrifying momentum as it goes. The track's thunderous drums clock in circa 140 BPM and the melody howls like an arctic gale. The deathly energy grows, but so does the smothering layer of crackle and hiss. It's as if the dance floor experience has got so intense you've started to dissociate—the body is battered by sound, the brain glitches and partially shuts down. Eventually "Pre Dawn" becomes dawn, and a grand synth passage enters, fizzing with nervous exhaustion. A voice sums it up: "Late at night… the energy… take me to the dream world."
"Indoors" is a weaker take on the same idea. This time the melody comes from a wordless singer, and the daybreak moment from cheesy piano chords. A chipmunked vocal loop heightens the track's death drive, but somehow the whole thing doesn't quite gel. Over a decade into his career, Burial is still chasing those moments where his strange sound collages fit together like puzzle pieces of the sublime. Sometimes he manages it, sometimes not.
TracklistA Pre Dawn
B Indoors