The past 12 months have witnessed a flurry of reminders that dubstep can be more than just an intricately sculpted deathmask for UK garage's sarcophagus. Skream's 'Request Line", fluttery and propulsive, was the sub-genre's most enchanting love letter to grime yet. Pitch's "Qawalli" went in the other direction, its distant low-end tribal thud and ghostly shards of accordion rejecting rigor mortis futurism in favour of necromantic fluidity. And then there's Burial, whose music is somewhere between these two poles, and also somewhere else entirely.

The most immediately striking aspect of this heretofore unknown producer's eponymous debut is that its beats are reminiscent of "proper" 2-step's frisky agility; except Burial's rhythms are nervous not joyous, their fleet-footed insubstantiality evoking the fear and dread of dubstep. It's not the delectably programmed beats that stick in your head, however-- else Burial would simply be Horsepower Productions redux. Instead, the success of this music lies almost entirely in its unexpected and unabashed emotionalism. Above the edgy beats hover layers of lugubrious synths, passing over one another like successive waves of blue and purple rainclouds. (The beatless "Night Bus" actually samples rainfall to heighten the effect.) Combined with its tense, busy rhythmic arrangements, the effect is reminiscent of the more cinematic late-90s techstep of Hidden Agenda or Dom & Roland.

Burial also sporadically resurrects the 2-step practice of sampling and fucking with female vocalists: On album opener "Distant Lights", a bleated "Now that I meet you..." drifts from the swirl like Brandy caught on the other side of the looking glass. This is Burial's best trump card: The handful of tracks with sampled vocals stand well above their brethren, possessing an almost manipulative quality of quivering emotional directness. Far from speaking of final resting places, the overriding vibe is one of homelessness and rootlessness, and the nagging feeling that something important has been mislaid. Thematically and sonically, the closest reference point is Tricky's eerie, foreboding "Broken Homes" (ironically, Burial's own "Broken Home" is perhaps the album's most upbeat moment, sampling a winsome reggae crooner); I'm also reminded of the black eyeliner melodrama of parts of DJ Shadow's The Private Press. Some may scoff at such middlebrow reference points, but it's these resemblances, rather than any fidelity to inner-London dance music, which makes Burial's music such a viable crossover candidate.

If anything, Burial is weakest when he conforms to the undemonstrative grimness of dubstep proper: The Spartan, assymetrical groove of "Spaceape" (featuring the MC of the same name) might sound impressively muscular over a soundsystem, but it's also the album's only genuinely unlikeable moment, and some otherwise interesting tracks such as the brooding "Southern Comfort" are dragged down by an air of tight-eyed stiffness, as if afraid of the open expressiveness which the album's highlights revel in. More generally, what prevents Burial from being quite as spectacular as its strongest moments promise is simply its inconsistency-- what we have here is a brilliant EP padded out with sketches and noble failures.

For the future, Burial would do well to concentrate on deploying these amassed secret weapons simultaneously, as he does on the astonishing "You Hurt Me", where a spiralling 2-step rhythm, foreboding Middle-Eastern drones, a disembodied diva plaintively moaning the title and a too-fleeting but essential sampled "Drop!" coalesce into a groove that's unnerving, mournful, and compulsively physical. Shepherding together so many familiar musical impulses, it's how Burial spins them into webs of torturous beauty that can make this music so compelling.