Heartbreakingly intimate
This is one of the best albums I have ever heard. It is a hauntingly embracing work of art. Each track is essential to the whole experience of the album, and you'll find yourself needing to hear it again and again and again...

Are they having a laugh?
I know this album is getting all these great reviews and people with really great taste can't get enough of it, but I don't get it! Yes, the first track is amazing, but the entire rest of the album sounds nearly exactly the same. In fact, the first time I played it I thought, "Wow, what a long song," only to find out that I was already on track 6! I am sure there are subtleties that I am missing, but I think this should have been sold as an EP, or as a EP of remixes, since they all do sound like the same song. I would love for someone to show me the error of my thought processing on this one, how could so many of you be wrong?

Exquisite rainy Sunday morning music
I found a review of this album on Pitchfork Media and while I've always had a love-hate relationship with that website's reviews something struck a chord with me and when they named it the 10th best album of 2007 I decided to give Burial's "Untrue" a shot. I'm really glad I did because it's one of the best discs of 2007. A tight combination of electronic, soul, dubstep (a new genre I was not familiar with before hearing this) and a little hip-hop, the music is indescribably good, with synths floating behind practically every track, vocals at times strangely altered, frenetic beats, and dub bass making it presence known here and there.

You know you're in for a special listening experience when a sound clip from David Lynch's film "Inland Empire" is used in the opening track "Untitled". My favorite tracks are "Ghost Hardware", the poignant, hypnotic "Endorphin" with alien sounding vocals, "Dog Shelter" with its gentle, bittersweet synths and the relentless, bouncy "Shell of Light" with it's beautiful female backing vocals and dreamy outro that lasts for a gorgeous 1 min. 15 seconds. Many of the tracks generate images of the gritty, urban rain-washed streets of London.

The music on this album sounds like a perfect mixture of Massive Attack, 90's electronic-techno greats Future Sound of London, and the UK hip-hop outfit The Streets. The music envelops you in an almost otherwordly, melancholy atmosphere, great to listen to all alone on a rainy Sunday morning.

I may have to give Pitchfork more credit than I'm used to, since they really hit a bull's eye on this one.

Great mood piece, but too repetitive
This appears to be one of those albums which would appeal more to critics than to the general, album-buying public. I think it's a unique work, very evocative and moody, meticulously crafted and produced, nicely blending dubstep and R & B, simultaneously dirty and crystaline in structure. Yet each track sounds, to my ears, very much like the previous one. Of course there are differences and shifts, but their subtlety relegates this work as one for studied, rather than for casual, listening. It struck me very similar in temperament and tone to Plasticman's "Consumed" from 10 yrs back. Ultimately, after repeated listens, I found too little movement between or within the songs on this album for me to recommend it or place it in heavy rotation, and though I do appreciate the artist's contribution in forwarding/expanding the genre, I think Burial's "Untrue" is overrated by critics.

IF you like THIS...
Message to adventurous explorers of the music kingdom who enjoy the music on "Untrue" by Burial... let me point you on down the road a bit to something else you will probably enjoy when you are ready:

Burial is sampling here, building collages with those samples, making a lot of references to loss and betrayal and showing us some bleak, dimly lit urban landscapes.

If you have a taste for that, check out a CD titled Streamer by Nils Petter Molvaer. He creates big, dark, echoing expanses and decorates them with angular neon spikes and urban textures. Molvaer has several tasty CDs in this vein. Khmer is another favorite, though it is hard to choose from all the delicious music Molvaer has recorded.

Another artist from Europe doing a similar style (to Molvaer) is horn player Erik Truffaz. You won't find as much cut and paste sampling of vocal tracks but the spaces and textures are similar. Try Saloua for a good taste of his "urban spaces at twilight."

Finally, though not quite as dark (or you could maybe say a bit more optimistic) you might try "Melange Bleu" from Lars Danielsson. This is sliding over into jazz territory a little. The sonic spaces are still expansive, the bass still pumps, the urban vibe is still very present and periodically a mysterious voice calls out across dimly lit landscapes.

Enjoy... well if "enjoy" is the correct term for music that tends toward solitary dimly lit introspection. Shuffling around in the dark here, hmmm, think I dropped my keys somewhere.