Burial – Kindred

February 12, 2012 • Hyperdub

There is something to be said for music after all.

I've been a casual listener of Burial for just a little while now, and I was never really a fan; both his first two albums were "just okay, nothing special" in my books. I decided to jump on the hype bandwagon for Kindred and give it a shot (as everyone on the Internet seemed to be crapping their pants over it). I was pretty lukewarm to the EP at first, but something compelled me to keep listening.

Where Untrue seemed to me like a dense collection of thirteen songs, Kindred tosses the songs for a complete focus on texture and sound—and it seems like Burial has mastered sound. The despairing-stormy-urban atmosphere played with before is amazingly done here. The sweeps of static, glitches, and samples are all perfectly placed and each one fits the mood exactly right. Just listen to the last half of "Ashtray Wasp"; all the crackles and ambience, together with the lonely vocals and the way samples are integrated into the beats create a stunning experience.

Speaking of which, when it comes to the beats, the more house-influenced bits—"Loner" and most of "Ashtray Wasp"—I'm not a huge fan of. Burial is much better at the skittery off-tempo step rhythms of "Kindred" and the uneasiness of those patterns fit the atmosphere much better than a straight 4/4 dance beat. Fortunately, the mood isn't ruined since the synth and bass lines all help to glue the drums to the ambience and they do a pretty nice job of it. Besides, the beats themselves usually take a backseat to the other sounds anyway—even just looking at the amount of playtime that simply has beats—so I'm not too upset.

Heck, Burial even fixed the main thing about Untrue that I hated: the vocals. While Untrue mercilessly mutilated the vocals to fit the tracks through egregious pitch-shifting and beat them into the listener's head through over-repetition, in Kindred we have none of those problems. Since it's not as song-oriented, vocals are a bit more sparse and the ones that are repeated more don't have the irritating forced correction (see the middle of "Ashtray Wasp"). Instead, they are again used to add to the texture and mood of the EP to great effect, in way that sort of reminds me of Pogo, which is pretty cool.

Finally Burial has made everything click together just right for me. The desolate yet still-somewhat-dancy atmosphere is right up my alley and I'm glad I gave it a shot. Kindred isn't perfect, but it's definitely the best I've heard from Burial and is certainly one of the better releases I've heard from this year. It's absolutely worth checking out especially for those—like me—who had trouble getting into his albums.

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