★★☆☆☆
Two Stars
Ambient music is a bit difficult to review. It’s very difficult to listen to two soundscapes and say that one is fundamentally better than the other.
Many thanks to Burial, then, for providing me with the easiest EP of ambient music to review. It has two tracks, one of which is fundamentally and noticeably better than the other.
Truant is a dream. It sounds like the Bill Murray from Lost in Translation and the Robert Pattinson from Cosmopolis driving around in a movie directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, silently staring out the windows of their vehicles and just watching the neon lights stream past.
It feels like a journey, but not a particular journey, as if the music just fancies having a wander. The voices that interfere are fuzzy and indistinct, merely shapes on the windscreen. It’s involving stuff, and there are sections with real punch which appear from nowhere as required.
Rough Sleeper, on the other hand, is alternately listless and uninspired. It sounds less like a neo-noir drive through LA and more like a long, slow trip down a plughole in a club in Dundee. The muffled pump of something which can only be approximated as “beats”, under an ostentatious and uncharacteristic organ part and the cheesiest sax solo since the ’80s, conspire to render this disjointed, dispiriting mess almost unlistenable.
Whereas Truant was almost jubilant in its bleakness, Rough Sleeper merely feels defeatist. It may be named after insomnia, but it doesn’t need to feel like it too. Before this effort, Burial hadn’t released anything since 2007’s Untrue. It shows. The scene has moved on without him, and the new reality calls for intelligent, experimental music, not this. Listen to The Caretaker instead.
