Don’t approach Burial’s Untrue as a dubstep record, but as a record, period. This should be true for all music, but ‘Untrue’ isn’t like all other music.

One could say that Burial’s most noteworthy achievement thus far is his sustained anonymity. In an age of Facebook pages, blogs, Google-retrieved images, YouTube, and Wikipedia, it is admirable that Burial has remained largely unknown even as his music becomes more widely circulated. Another could remark that Burial will be remembered as the person who was most responsible for introducing dubstep. a largely UK-centric dance sub-genre that shares roots in drum and bass, 2-step, and UK garage, to virgin ears. Then I could say that no one really gives a rat’s ass because the reality is that these preoccupations are mostly irrelevant, and at best are nothing more than PR softballs lobbed at unsuspecting journalists. What is relevant is what Burial sounds like, why it’s relevant in 2007 and beyond, and what makes it beautiful.

Burial, the 2006 self-titled debut that transformed its namesake into an internet celebrity overnight, topping Wire’s year-end albums list and crashing a couple more, is an album that plants its focus squarely on its individual elements. The pitches of each snare’s click, crack, or thwack varies from song to song, as do the sounds used for hi-hats, resembling everything from a gun cartridge being loaded to jingling change. Bass and keyboard drones reveal subtle differences despite cursory similarities. These minutiae are each so specific, so separate, and yet so complementary in tone and approach that Burial succeeded primarily by showing its seams, a rarity among electronic albums in the 21st century.