James Blake
James Blake
[Atlas/A&M]
Rating: 9.0/10
(This post originally appeared on Audiosuede)
Hit the jump for the review.
As a kid, and I guess even now, I was interested in how things broke but still sort of worked. Like, when my Super Mario Bros. cartridge would glitch and I would be playing world triangle dash two, where there were random blocks in the air and enemies that walked in one place. Or like when a computer monitor’s VGA input was dying and the display would wobble and discolor, creating modern art shapes out of your desktop. It’s accidental deconstruction. In that spirit, I’ve always been very interested in deconstruction– accidental or intentional– in music. James Blake, the self-titled debut from the astoundingly multi-talented producer/songwriter, traffics in deconstruction, and comes out the other side, paradoxically, with one of the most coherent albums of the young year.
In 2010, Blake rocked three disparate yet similar, individual but spiritually-connected EPs in The Bell’s Sketch, CMYK, and Klavierwerke. Each focused on a different touchpoint of Blake’s sound, giving tantalizing views of exactly how talented Blake was as a complete artist. On James Blake, the Londoner has synthesized his gifts– rich gospel drama, highly emotive R&B melancholy, woozy dance rhythms, harmonically engaging chord structures that challenge both the mind and the ear, and striking vocal manipulations– into one astounding whole.
What’s immediately noticeable about Blake’s debut LP is its fearlessness. Take for instance Blake’s voice. The man isn’t the strongest singer, and you can notice how it breaks as it strains for certain notes, but he unabashedly makes it the centerpiece of several tracks here, like the two-part “Lindesfarne” suite, or the heartbreaking gut punch of closer “Measurements.” Listen to how silence isn’t just used in Blake’s music, it’s embraced. The cavernous spaces are used brilliantly as transitions on “I Mind” and “Limit To Your Love,” and as sucker punch surprises on tracks like “I Never Learnt to Share.” Multiple seconds can pass between individual notes, and each moment invites further emotional investment, allowing the listener to fill the spaces with their own hardships.
And Blake isn’t afraid to manipulate any sort of source material. He takes Feist’s “Limit To Your Love” and both captures its punishing sadness and changes its tone entirely by reducing the verses to bass wobbles and lonely percussion; he distorts the instrumentation on “Lindesfarne II” to the point that it takes almost the entirety of the song to realize it had acoustic guitar in it; he warps and splices vocals like a surgeon on “To Care (Like You)”, lending it an immeasurable sense of distance. And on tracks “I Mind” and “Wilhelm’s Scream” he uses an exacto knife to splice together an appetizer platter of tones– pitch shifting coos, hand-played percussion, dollops of keys, wobbling synths– with a sense of relative abandon. And through his immaculate rearrangement, his talent for deconstruction, those tunes come out the other side with genuine and undeniable impact.
Where Blake is the most fearless, however, is in his rendering of human emotion. This is downtrodden music, handled in such a way so as to lend the downtrodden a sense of catharsis. A choir of Blakes sing, “You’re not on your own” at one point on closer “Measurements.” While the soulful melodies that populate Blake’s masterful first LP may sound contradictory, the man’s artful interpretation of heartfelt emotion causes James Blake to sound hopeful, even when it speaks of defeat.
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