Record collection rave: Burial’s Dreamfear reviewed

Among the scraps of information to have emerged from the few Burial interviews to date is that Will Bevan is an electronic music fanboy. On this Blackdown interview from 2005 he talks about Digital Mystikz, Skream, Photek and The Chemical Brothers; one year later he praised MJ Cole and El-B; when he talked to Kode 9 in 2007 he mentioned “drum & bass, jungle, hardcore, garage, dubstep” and so on.

Even if you didn’t know this, it would be pretty obvious from Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above, Burial’s new 12 inch for XL Records, that we are dealing with an obsessive music fan. Simon Reynolds, writing for the New York Times in 1993, coined the term “record collection rock” to talk about bands like Urge Overkill and Pavement who prefer to revive particular rock music styles rather than immerse themselves in contemporary sounds. Burial might be an example of record collection rave: an artist who ceaselessly revives dance music’s past, without too much care for setting their sights on the future.

There’s nothing particularly unique about this: Tim Reaper brilliantly revives the technically-leaning side of mid 90s jungle, while Scuba’s recent Digital Underground mixtape was inspired by “the classic early 90s sound palette of pre-94 hardcore, early jungle, acid house, techno”.

And those are just the first two examples that came to mind. It’s been a long time since dance music, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, seemed more concerned with innovation than renovation. (A massive over-simplification, I know. But I’ll go with it.) Burial, however, like to plough his own field. Most artists prefer to revive one particular sound, be it house or hardcore. Burial, on his new record recreates everything from trance to techno, electro to ambient, over the course of just two songs.

I say two songs because that is how the record is presented: Dreamfear on one side and Boy Sent From Above on the other, each track upwards of 13 minutes long. But if you’re not really paying attention as you listen, you could be forgiven for thinking that there are, in fact, 12 different songs over the two sides of vinyl (or two YouTube rips in my case) so radically does each track change up its style.

Dreamfear moves from an ambient intro to phantom hardcore break, deviates off into dirty trance, breaks down into near silence, builds back up with a thunderous electro momentum and ends with arpeggiated techno that reminds me of Underworld.

Boy Sent From Above starts on a similarly atmospheric note, left turns into grimey electro, breaks to silence, takes a plunge into 1980s break dance grooves, briefly diverts into church organ drone, returns to the 80s for some Axel F / freestyle funk, accelerates into furious tekno, of the kind you used to hear in clubs when techno DJs still played hardcore, and finishes up with the ridiculous dance rap The KLF once pulled off with aplomb. Just writing about it has given me a comedown.

Sometimes these sections are linked by a reoccurring sample, beat or simply tempo. At others, they appear to float about perfectly independent, only united in song because Burial says they are, with Bevan slamming on the musical brakes in between like a particularly thick-fingered DJ.

Mixed in with this non-specific genre revival are several very pointed references to specific songs. Dreamfear samples — or appears to sample — Thomas P. Heckmann’s proto trance classic Amphetamine, the “let’s go” vocal from The Prodigy’s rave anthem Everybody In The Place (released, of course, on XL Records) and F.U.S.E.’s chilling techno classic Substance Abuse. (Some observers claim to hear a sample of Bomfunk MCs about 6.50 in, which would be wonderful if true.) And these are just the things I picked up on. Rather than record a simple rave call back, Burial is trying to pay homage every single record of XL’s glorious early hardcore years.

I say “appear to sample” because I just don’t know. In the case of the “let’s go” vocal, for example, if Burial has sampled it then he probably went back to where The Prodigy themselves took the sample from. If WhoSampled is right, this would be Freestyle Part 1 by MC Duke and Merlin, a rap duo I know very little about. But the technicalities matter less to us than to XL’s lawyers; for almost all listeners, at least in the UK, that “let’s go” is the spirit of The Prodigy’s dirty rave circa 1991.

Luckily, Burial is smart — or perhaps fortunate — in that he established his unique musical language of dusty vinyl murk and disjoined voices right from his first release. And this has become so recognisable Burial that he only needs to wheel it our again for this record to pick up the distinctive air of Burial-ness.

At first, I thought of this murk as a crutch, a sound that Burial clings to because he knows no better. But now it feels more like a walking stick, a well-worn tool that enables the enigmatic producer to go where he wants, like Paul McCartney’s honeyed sense of melody or Miles Davis’s smooth trumpet tones. (Not THAT good obviously. But you know what I mean.)

Burial is exceptionally strong with melody and atmosphere. And yet, if you removed the murk from these two songs, there is a good chance that they would come across as slightly clichéd, particularly the more 80s-leaning sections. As it stands, though, that’s not something to worry about. Burial is among the select group of electronic music producers who have managed to forge their own instantly recognisable sound and now he gets to wallow in it.

Dreamfear and Boy Sent From Above aren’t, perhaps, at the very top tier of Bevan’s musical catalogue; of latter-period Burial Rival Dealer and Shock Power Of Love remain the peak. But the two songs have enough spark, energy and vital melody — witness the piercing android lament of Dreamfear’s recurrent central riff or the electrifying hooks of Boy Sent From Above’s climax — to justify the idea of record collection rave all on their own.

This review was originally taken from my Substack. If you like it, why not sign up? Dance music past and present. https://linenoise.substack.com/