Without dwelling too much on what essentially is a means of rigidly pigeonholing a particular sound - and, at the risk of incurring a mighty wrath from those who are more beholden to the myriad sub-classifications within electronic music - dubstep is a frequently dark, bass-heavy, dub-reggae-indebted extension of mainly British, turn-of-the-millennium garage dance music. Rhythms tend to be more sparse and, in some cases, sporadic, frequently placing a focus on the (near) silent spaces within the song - or, more specifically, focusing on the listener's relationship with those spaces.

In some cases, the result is a sense of jitteriness or dislocation in the listener that forces him or her to fill in the gaps. At times it's like the sonic equivalent of weightlessness, or maybe one of those weekend-retreat trust exercises in which you let your entire body go rag-doll-limp and yield yourself to the mercy of those spinning you around in a group circle. Or maybe that's just me. Either way, the style is mind-swimmingly engrossing, and Burial stands out as one of the genre's most stimulating practitioners.

Untrue is an improvement over its predecessor - thanks to its welding of ominous, rust-encrusted cityscape nihilism to an anguished sensuality, weighted with longing and hinting ever so slightly at glimmers of optimism. Burial accomplishes this by weaving chopped, spliced, pitch-tweaked, and otherwise processed vocals - courtesy of whom? Ah, another level of mystery and anonymity to the story - into the fits-and-starts rhythms, arsonous synth flame-crackles, and spectral echoes that inform the hollowed-out urban-skeleton backdrops.

Here, it is always late, late night, and the streets are wet from a rain which is never heavy enough for a Travis Bickle-satisfying thorough cleaning, but always steady enough to be downright annoying. Listen closely to the pops and crackles which slide in and out of the speakers, and you'll witness the slow crawl of cars passing cautiously along damp avenues, drivers with locked doors in their four-wheel fortresses as threats real and imagined lurk in the shadows at every corner. Turn a corner, and the headlights hit the scuttling of rats; turn another, and a huddle of slouched-backed figures hover around a tin-drum campfire. Beaten-down tenements yawn back with crooked smiles, their broken windows laying in stretches of shattered glass along the sidewalks below.

But from somewhere up above - perhaps deep in the back room of one of these burnt-out buildings, or perhaps even wafting in the mist which cloaks the city like a shroud - comes a disembodied voice, warm and soulful if it were not for the fact that such a thing feels so impossible given the circumstances. And yet there it is, wooing and pleading and emoting away in silky-smooth tones, almost defiantly projecting hope and humanity in the face of such cold-hearted neglect. At times it's the sound of a woman crying out for a loved one. At other moments, a masculine croon gives way to a sweet falsetto, sliding and diving through the rubble.

Without fail the voices are obscured. The chill remains so thick that even the purest expressions of emotion are muffled - and sometimes nearly snuffed out - by the cruel shadows of this inhospitable terrain. The listener never gets more than a couple lines of a stirring melody before the voice drifts out of focus - and most of the time, even then, the words remain fuzzed-out by an environment which seems hellbent on keeping folks as disconnected from each other as possible.

The result is a dramatic duke-it-out between a hostile, unwelcoming landscape and the desire for human contact, and the winner never becomes clear. Just when you think humanity's coming up on top - thanks to a particularly catchy, vaguely Top 40-recalling melody (and Untrue offers plenty of these "where have I heard that before?" fragmentary R&B ballad moments) - in comes a powerful, silencing jab of atmospheric hum or a bone-breaking clatter of rhythm. Remember Goldie's 1995 breakbeats-and-divas jungle masterwork, Timeless (FFRR)? Well, scrap the lush, symphonic strings, strip the vocals down to the barest bits, and dismantle the rhythms as much as possible - and while you're at it, bundle the whole thing up in blankets of whirrs and drones - and you'll get somewhere close to the Burial aesthetic.

Untrue is dystopian-soul music, the sound of love-starved dreamers reaching out into the darkness. Eerily sensual and engrossingly disorienting, it's a record which burrows under the skin and stays there. I can't imagine casually throwing this on as background while entertaining guests or doing housework. These 50 minutes are meant for full-submersion into the shadows.