This was my first time listening to Untrue, and two major memories came to mind.
The first is from 2013. I was interning at a production company and my job for the day was to take the gigantic pile of business cards and enter them into the company's Outlook contacts. It was a mindless enough task that I did it while listening to music, and the last album I listened to that day was Since I Left You by The Avalanches, an album that's now a desert island favorite of mine. Like Untrue, Since I Left You is a mostly sample-based album you can dance to or listen to with headphones. The difference, however, is entirely in aesthetic. Since I Left You is an album of boundless joy and energy and Untrue sounds like the sharp comedown that happens after you experience something like what Since I Left You has to offer.
Yet I thought about Since I Left You a lot while listening to it. Maybe it's from growing up in a "rap is crap" house, but I still feel like sampling is dismissed much too easily. Yet you listen to these albums back to back and it becomes clear what sampling can accomplish and the wide range of emotionality it can cover. It's not that I've never listened to something like Burial before. As a matter of fact, I had to constantly remind myself that I was listening to something from 2007 and not 2017. But I could still feel this album stimulating parts of my brain that rarely get touched. The musical marriage of drum patterns that make your head nod and a frigid mournful tone. Melancholy dance music. (The only other example of that union I can think of at the moment is the 2021 self-titled album by For Those I Love, which is a genius album everyone should listen to.)
The other memory was from 2011. I was in a musician buddy of mine's dorm and he found this mixtape called House of Balloons from this dude called The Weeknd. We were freaking out about how this is the next guy well before it was over, but this memory came to mind because I thought a lot about how hard "What You Need" hit me on my first listen.
The idea of taking a poppier sample like the one from Aaliyah's "Rock the Boat" and bringing it to this much more subdued moodier place was a revolutionary idea for me at the time. I didn't know then that Burial had treaded those waters years before. Of course, there was also DJ Shadow (who I was a fan of since high school) and other stuff like that existed as well. Albums that brought a more emotive philosophy to their sampling. But something about that Weeknd song didn't feel like DJ Shadow or anything like it. It's the feeling I got from Untrue.
I hear the influence of Untrue everywhere. And not just in The Weeknd and that wave of haunted R&B, but in so many other places as well. Yet, thanks in large part to its production and unique sampling, it feels very singular. It's an album that's simultaneously everywhere and nowhere else.
The video @tsiku linked to ends with a quote from Burial. "What I want is that feeling when you're in the rain, or a storm. It's a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it's just for you." I thought about the rain a lot while listening. Granted, some of that has to do with the fact that I was listening to this album while playing Minecraft, and it was raining in the game too. (No, YOU'RE embarrassed to admit that!) But... I don't know. A lot of people associate rain with sadness, but I like rain. It makes me think of grass growing. It's exactly the kind of duality that makes Untrue sing. It took me to musical moments in my past of being hit with more icy music as well as moments of musical bliss.
So yeah, I liked it.
Favorite Songs: "Ghost Hardware," "Untrue," "Homeless"
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