On Repeat: Burial's New Single Chemz Is A Twisted And Fused Electronic Love Ballad
Tristan Young @talltristan
Quietly, cryptically, and in a refreshingly unobtrusive manner, Burial has cultivated one of the most impressive catalogues of electronic music in the last generation. His long form tracks are often understated to the point of being sedate, but just as often tumultuous epics in their renditions of dramatically excavated sensations and emotion. His new single Chemz is a worthy and dazzling inclusion to this simmering collective. Long enough to be an EP in of itself, Chemz looks at themes of devotion and need through the lens of pop culture saturation, but then distorts that lens to such a tense extreme, that what could be characterized as frivolity is expressed instead in dire and fiercely consequential terms. Featuring vocals heavily sampled from Head Over Heels by Allure, Burial masks the patchwork he makes of stitching it together with other vocal samples by dialling their frequencies up to an unnaturally terse register. Velvety and graceful gusts of synth start to twitch with a glistening shuffle, and move the track along at an impressively brisk pace considering the spartan percussion and at this point non-existent bass. Linda Ross’s 1990 neon burner Bad Girl is also repurposed repeatedly on the instrumental side and it’s pretty cool. As the vocal samples contort even further the silver linings of the sequencers portend a darker cloud and the song begins to realize this sense of subtle doom. This ominous down shift into a more stalking iteration of the synth shuffles would be firmly oppressive were it not for the weightless ephemera they are comprised of. The pleading, “don’t know what I would do without your love” and “can’t you see I will never let you down”, impact with feverish zealotry as the grace in their words is consumed by twisted obsession. This manipulated psychosis within the lyrics is remarkable in that Chemz can take simple lyrical pop arrangements and make them sound almost threatening. That threat escalates climatically midway through as the darker synth tides no longer exhaust themselves but erupt into vibrant and ferociously agitated oscillations. Initially it seems like the beat has been glitched to hell and back with 8 bit modulations, but it’s actually brilliantly dense electronic string arpeggios compacted into vibrant pulses. The cascading waves of lyrics, growing less and less discernable, succumb to the delirium of the track and it’s exhilarating. The sequence crystalizes the idea of how much enormity can be extracted from pop ballad crooning if you can apply enough pressure. Burial has an inexorable talent for inverting the large and the small, and weaving a symbiotic loop for them to exist in together at the same time. It’s dense and intimidating, but it also offers everything you need. It’s a similar sentiment echoed by the lyrics of singers professing the depth of their devotion to someone. No wonder it all comes together so convincingly.