[kid cue]

Originally Posted by Strangelet

With all those preambles on my opinion, there's a samey-ness here when you compare the new stuff with the previous work that means, as brilliant as it is, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of room to grow within its own structure. You could alter that structure, but then you're truly moving away from what made the burial lp so awesome.

i know where you're coming from re: samey-ness, but i disagree. the album sounds more uniform to me, and once the idiosyncracies of each song work their way in, you're left with a considerably greater impact than on the first album (shock of the new aside). i think Untrue is a big move forward in terms of depth, technique, and emotion. he took the same ghostly, Frankenstein-esque ethos that he applied to the drums, bass, and samples, and applied it to vocal science--it isn't just another layer; it totally changes the way the music affects you. this sounds like the ghosts and voices of [your city here] coming out the woodworks after the isolation and implied memories of the self-titled LP. the music has meaning in the purest, most expressive sense. this was a really sound, perhaps a bit cautious, but well-considered artistic step forward.

if anything it's TOO much--the heavy, melodic ambient stuff started to weigh down on me today--but the garage tracks are the bomb. "Archangel" is the one, it's a genuinely moving pop song; but "Near Dark" is pretty overlooked too, like a slightly disorted mirror image of the previous song--demented and quite lost.

Maybe newer directions can be awesome too, i just don't see infinite richness.

i meant infinite richness not in terms of style, but in the same sense that you think of any great work of art--it's open-ended; you keep hearing new things and making new associations for yourself, etc. the music is also very detailed--the crackle, bass harmonics, and various vocal inflections are subtly shifting all the time, and the drumwork is a lot better than before IMO.

i'm interested in hearing more along the lines of "Stairwell," which was a hyperdark rave stormer that doesn't sound much like anything on these last two LPs. i think he has plenty of ideas left to go