Album Of The Week: Burial Rival Dealer

A little more than halfway through the 10-minute title track of Burial's Rival Dealer EP, around the time the first titanic sawtooth bassline disappears into static and the second one comes roaring in, we hear a brief burst of Lord Finesse declaiming "you know my motherfuckin' style." But if that's Burial using Finesse as his mouthpiece, he's absolutely wrong. Rival Dealer, in its three-track half-hour glory, is definitive proof that we don't know Burial's motherfucking style, that almost everything we thought we knew about the reclusive producer is wrong. In the past, I've admired certain elements of Burial's production -- the rainy alone-in-the-universe vibe, the delicate stacking of samples -- without quite connecting to the genius that so many others heard in his tracks. But even for a relative skeptic like me, Rival Dealer stands as a monumental piece of work, one that keep's Burial's chilly architecture intact while pushing him into radically new places, both stylistically and emotionally.