Nothing Around You But Clear Blue Sky

Burial “Unknown Summer”

In the same way that Wes Anderson is a cartoonist who somehow works in the medium of live action film, Burial is a filmmaker who somehow works in the medium of music. This is especially true of Burial’s more recent works, which tend to be one-off singles that contain enough musical ideas to feel like entire albums condensed into ten minutes or so. This isn’t to say that there’s a plot to these songs, but more that the movements in the music come across as scenes that imply narrative structure. Even with some intelligible vocal samples floating through the track this is a very abstract work and the bits that really hit are purely musical – an opening sequence that deliberately fries your perception of time, a balearic house keyboard part that feels like a flashback to a happier time, the way everything in the final third seems to slowly disintegrate. All the little disorienting asymmetries in this track are masterfully edited and lend the overall composition a bittersweet nostalgic quality that I find very, very moving in ways I can’t quite explain.

Buy it from Bandcamp.