Burial

If the nay-sayers are to be believed, then rock, pop and rave are dead and we’re all living in some limbo-like afterlife, trapped there with the slowly decaying corpse of our own pop-culture. Modern music, say the theorists, is now so self-referential that it’s locked itself in a closed-loop, endlessly chasing its own tail. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy: a hermetic, self-perpetuating process that’s content to merely make imperfect photocopies of itself.

But last year’s stunning debut album by Burial (and its various satellite singles) seemed to point to a way out of this cultural stalemate, showing us how emotion could be slotted back into an increasingly stale equation. Like us, Burial couldn’t help wondering about all those great tunes that used to make us laugh and cry: where does an old song go to when it dies?

Burial’s music uses old UK garage and rave tunes as its template, treating them as venerable traditions that now deserve the sort of love and respect that aficionados once afforded jazz or the blues. He takes the standard tropes of 2-Step and UKG - pitched-up feminine pressure and syncopated shuffle-beats - and transforms them into a crackle-shrouded pirate broadcast from some spectral, re-imagined past.

But Burial’s tunes are more than just an elegy for the MDMA generation: they’ve taken on a strange half-life of their own, reaching out and touching old punks, dub-heads and indie kids - anyone who’s ever been moved to tears by a great piece of music.