burial, untrue review

Untrue by Burial is the sound of electricity bouncing around my head on the train journey home; if you told me I'd find a record in the latter half of 2007 which knocked me sideways and staggered me, which I immediately identified with, I'd have given you money it wouldn't be a dark, haunting dubstep record which buzzed with bass and provoked dizzying, nostalgic recollections of a scene – rave – which isn't even in my realm of experience. But yeah, it's marvellous, and utterly in tune with how I feel, which is really odd.

Why, well, because of when and where I listen to it, I think – it's the kind of record that would have sounded utterly out of place in the summer, but the clocks have turned and so far it's inhabited me during the dead hour which is my journey home from work, sat heavy lidded on an impossibly bright train staring hard out of the window at the rapidly darkening sky, which tonight is all black horizon and purple clouds, bisected by a thin stripe of orange-pink.

The record is ghostly and terrific, a familiar palate of sounds spun into a delicious soundscape; snatches of heavily processed soul vocals, synth washes and those delightfully crunchy, other worldly beats, constructed from gunshots and the sounds of empty bullet casings clattering to the floor. On several occasions its hands-in-the-air melodies transport me back to a fictional place in my past, and I remember myself on a dancefloor I've never stepped on. Most of all it just clatters through me and mirrors my mental state, sounding foggy, dreamlike and faintly exhausted at the end of a long day, with all the reverberations of the preceding hours still possessing me, snatching through my consciousness like the sudden, distant vocal samples on the record.

Oh, wow, it's a really tremendous record, and I'm just in love with it.