Burial — Untrue

Electronic🐐UK Garage
Written By Akhil Srivatsan
 
burial
 

You know what it's like, a city night. especially pre-2020. The sound of sparse traffic, people walking around each other, earphones on. Tubelit corner shops, tubelit buses, tubelit trains. A steady night rain experienced from within a quite porous jacket. Lonely, cold, empty. But you know what city nights could be, especially pre-2020. A bar with a close friend, holding hands about parents living elsewhere, brothers and sisters whose lives have led them to other cities with other nights. By a parapet wall, overseeing other friends in other houses, husbands wives kids, dinners drinks dates. Warm, full, lush. 

You know what it's like, mostly, 1:15 am on a Saturday morning, walking through one of the few places in the world where life is hammering on at what would a hundred kilometres away be an ungodly hour. An invitation to a new scene, a new DJ, an after party, a lonely cab ride back to an empty apartment, a hard-earned weekend of nothing-doing.

You know that ache in your soul as the witching hour approaches and you find yourself stationary at a red light, a light drizzle tapping away at your cab, caught in the space between night and day, being asleep and being awake, just floating. Big Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney. Life In A Metro. The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Burial’s Untrue

If you, like me, see the city night as a human emotion, no work of art better encapsulates it than Burial's Untrue. Musically, it's easy to name its constituent parts: part UK garage, part broken beats, part glitchy atmosphere, part time-stretched vocal samples, part reverb-drenched masters. But there's something magical that makes it a lot greater than the sum of its parts. Something that makes it among the greatest albums ever made.

Cities are a tribute to two parts of our monkey brains: the first that seeks to climb, the other that seeks to congregate. And as with most things about the human condition, these two fundamental instincts run counter to one another. The first alienates, the second makes us ache. The first gets us on the guest list, the second wishes our real friends were there. The first gets us back home on time, the second wishes there was someone else there. At the end of the day, a city night is a moment of stillness at the end of one hustle and before another. A liminal state captured beautifully by Untrue, a modern-day classic.

Check it out on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music.

The Music Box
Pinegrove – Pinegrove on Audiotree Live
Pinegrove – Pinegrove on Audiotree Live

In this piece, I navigate the intricate soundscapes of Pinegrove's Audiotree performance, set against the backdrop of the bustling city and its ubiquitous cafes. My exploration of indie studio sounds, alongside an introspective study of key indie bands, unravels a tale of life, hope, rejection, and the unending rhythm of the urban existence.

Basement – Colourmeinkindness
Basement – Colourmeinkindness

I don’t believe I’m in a position to share any facts about the band Basement except that, in the 2010s, they played lightly distorted mildly noisy alternative rock. And that in 2012, they recorded an album called Colourmeinkindness, which has a sound that serves as a great backing track for the part of one’s life that’s punctuated by deeply introspective walks in the blistering heat.

12 RODS – My Year (This Is Going To Be)
12 RODS – My Year (This Is Going To Be)

12 RODS sit high on the list of all-time favourites I never expected to hear from again; in fact, until a week ago, they perhaps sat atop that list. A week ago, that is, when they released their latest single, My Year (This Is Going To Be), and announced an album to be released later this year, their first since 2002’s Lost Time.

Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster
Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster

The hypermodel before me sticks her arm out a couple feet to take what must be an immaculately captured self-portrait that’d put Van Gogh’s to shame. In doing so, she reveals her pronounced wristbones, bony arms, pale and sunken pits, textbook indicators of poor nourishment.

Nouvelle Vague – Nouvelle Vague
Nouvelle Vague – Nouvelle Vague

The one thing that kept her going through a set was the promise of a beer, some fries, and a big burger on the other end. As she breezed through one lounge cover after another – from a smouldering rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart through an absent-minded interpretation of Making Plans For Nigel to a non-punk version Teenage Kicks – all she would visualise was that meal: bar food on bar china.

Radiohead – The Bends
Radiohead – The Bends

You’re in mainland Europe – somewhere in the continent’s northwest. Alone in an English pub run by the English, frequented by the English. Most brownfolk with a sense of history would likely find much of the imagery here discomforting, but most would overlook it. The pub’s been playing the Bends, all the way from Planet Telex on; this is a strange sort of place.

Nothing – Tired of Tomorrow
Nothing – Tired of Tomorrow

Sitting in the world’s most absurd café after completing the world’s most meandering walk, your phone suggests you listen to Nothing’s Famine Asylum off of their 2020 album, The Great Dismal. You’re reminded of an earlier album by the same band as a beskirted post-Soviet NFT scamster asks a vaguely Mediterranean dad-bodied man wearing a deep blue TOMMY JEANS tee to take a photo.

Bartika Eam Rai – Bimbaakash
Bartika Eam Rai – Bimbaakash

Not all sadness is the same dad, he was trying to explain to his ageing father. Pa had spent much of the mid-seventies damming one of India’s major rivers with other ‘sons and daughters of the newly independent nation’. Come rain, come sleet, they bored through terrain, mixed concrete, fixed slabs, built barricades against portented landslides.

Weezer – Weezer (Blue Album)
Weezer – Weezer (Blue Album)

The thing nobody seems to ask about the boy who cried wolf is why Bubby would do such a thing. What would prompt an otherwise standard-issue ten-year-old – likely even-tempered and straight-laced – to, on seemingly unconnected days, run through his village screaming about a wolf he’s seen? Aesop blames it on boredom and naughtiness but eventually faults the kid.

Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden
Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden

Of course it isn’t fair that if you were to split the world’s population in two halves, you would find 4 billion people, on the one hand, who give more than they’re given in return, and 4 billion, on the other, who are given more than they give. Of course it isn’t fair that there’s no real reason for this except the inherent unfairness of the world, what it means to be.

Akhil Srivatsan
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