Eighteen months since his last EP, Burial drops us in the middle of a desolate plain. Murky drones swirl, winds howl, and a voice full of Biblical portent mutters, “I saw something… flower, bloom from nothing.” Whatever “Comafields,” the title of the new EP’s A-side, might mean to Burial, the 12-minute track certainly suggests a vast, forbidding netherzone stretching darkly beyond the realm of consciousness.
All par for the hauntological course, you might say, and you wouldn’t be wrong; with “Comafields,” William Bevan is up to all his old tricks—vinyl crackle, unquantized samples, mournfully abraded synths that sound like they’ve been dredged up from a watery grave. But even so, the track—not so much a song as a Frankensteined-together mini-suite, like much of his recent output—feels distinct. After the hardscrabble breakbeats and glowering rave nostalgia of last year’s Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above EP, “Comafields” is unusually sleek. It’s built out of mournfully tumbling synth arpeggios and a straightforward 4/4 kick, elegiac sequences that periodically give way to harried bleeping that brings to mind the worried pulse of hospital machinery.
It’s riddled with spoken-word scraps suggesting revelation, or divine visitation, or perhaps the heavenly beam of a near-death experience (“I can still see”; “strobelight”). The centerpiece is a mournful vocal hook shot through with yearning: “You put your arms around me,” time-stretched and drenched in reverb, like weary angels proffering relief. Reddit’s investigators debate whether the voice is that of Jens Lekman, Sinéad O’Connor, or perhaps both of them, braided together in heavenly concord. Whatever Bevan is doing with those vocal samples, “Comafields” is one of the most affecting tracks he’s given us in a while—ambient trance as a weighted blanket for the soul.
