Burial’s sampled vocal style pointed the way for Blake’s sung pop

Evidence

You might go so far as to say that the introspective turn reached a kind of conclusion with Blake’s 2013 album Overgrown. In his transformation from dubstep to pop, Blake had gone from digitally manipulating his own voice to becoming a singer; from constructing tracks to writing songs. The initial motivation for Blake’s approach to the song no doubt came from Burial, whose combination of jittery 2-step beats and R&B vocal samples pointed the way to a possible vision of 21st century pop. It was as if Burial had produced the dub versions; now the task was to construct the originals, and that entailed replacing the samples with an actual vocalist. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 457

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Blake’s career arc saw the spectral voice become a conventional front-of-mix singer — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 458