Albums of the decade No 10: Burial – Untrue
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Observer Music Monthly starts the countdown to the best album of the decade with this melancholic masterclass from dubstep’s dark knight
In an era when musicians revealed their private lives to the public via MySpace and Twitter, when even the biggest stars were stripped of enigma by the paparazzi or in the pages of Heat, the idea of anonymity suddenly seemed powerful, if you knew how to use it. So when electronic music prodigy Burial released his self-titled debut album in 2006, declining even to identify himself, let alone submit to photographs and interviews, it certainly lent his soulful take on the era’s key sub-genre – dubstep – extra mystique. By the time its successor, 2007’s Untrue, won a Mercury prize nomination, and Burial was being hyped as the next Aphex Twin – a whiz kid from the margins set to impact on the mainstream – the myth was powerful enough for one tabloid to start a campaign to name him.
In the end, Burial saved them the bother by quickly “outing” himself as William Bevan, a young south Londoner reared on 1990s drum’n'bass and garage. Untrue married the former’s sense of scale with the latter’s fleetness of foot, adding a sadness that was unique to Bevan. It was soaked in a particularly urban melancholy: the 3am blues of In McDonald’s was instantly recognisable to anyone who’s ever been stuck in a fast food outlet in the early hours with only a styrofoam cup of coffee for warmth. While other dubstep artists grew colder and more alienated, Bevan outstripped his peers by heading in the opposite direction, conjuring emotion from disembodied female vocal samples and old videogames. These were explicit links between rave’s past and its thriving offspring in the present, who were still plugging away in the underground, occasionally yielding up something truly special.
Buy this Sunday’s Observer for the full top 50 countdown, plus an interview with the winner.