Consumer Guide Album

Burial: Truant/Rough Sleeper [Hyperdub, 2012]
In which the mystery man follows up the Kindred EP with what is nominally a two-"song" "single," each title divided into silence-separated sections and the whole thing clocking in at 25:32 it says here. Background music it's not--while I admired it fine doing my daytime musical tasks, I only got it when I put it on at five o'clock in the morning, whereupon I discovered that its spooky gravity and deliberate movement suggested elegiac or perhaps even inspirational goals. Fifteen years later, the Alan Lomax gospel samples of Moby's Play are regarded as shamelessly corny in the techno world. I wonder whether the opening organ melody and very nearly hooky keyboard-ostinato facsimile that comes in around 8:30 of "Rough Sleeper" will offend ascetic snobs another decade or two down the line. A-