Antidawn

Burial included ambient interludes on his first two albums, and he gradually devoted more room on his singles to beatless compositions during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Antidawn is a lengthy five-track EP of ambient Burial, letting the atmospheric passages from his records stretch out into long, meandering suites. The elusive South Londoner's music has always expressed feelings of loneliness and displacement, but his more beat-driven material has often countered the emptiness with flashes of ecstasy, serving as a reminder of how glorious life can be, or at least how it was in the past. Antidawn is as far from the club as Burial's music gets, and it offers no such relief. The time-stretched, effects-masked vocals that surface throughout the fog of static and crackle double down on the isolated feelings, saying foreboding phrases like "I'm in a bad place" and "there's nowhere to go." "Shadow Paradise" tries to provide some comfort, with voices cooing "let me hold you for a while" and a line about being "alone in a reverie," while disfigured synths blare like an extended breakdown from a long-forgotten '90s trance anthem, played off a melting cassette. There are numerous moments throughout the EP where it seems like a beat is about to kick in, or synths begin to swell, making one expect something grand and revelatory to happen, yet it never does. "Upstairs Flat" has such a moment, with a pitched-up voice leading off with the phrase, "somewhere, in the darkest night..." before trailing off into nowhere, and there's countless times where it sounds like a mouth is opening and taking a breath before saying something, but then the words never come. Such moments of unfulfilled anticipation and endless, directionless drifting might make Antidawn seem difficult compared to other Burial releases, but there's something quietly powerful in the way he's able to express the sensation of being inexplicably lost. ~ Paul Simpson