London producer James Blake’s self-titled debut album has relegated everything else in my music library to second-class status for the past month, but for an album I’ve listened to 60 times it remains unusually difficult to contain.
The individual components of each song are so precisely ordained, it’s tempting to call Blake a perfectionist. But he’s been so prolific—this is his fourth release in 11 months—that “genius” may be a more apt description.
The album is chock full of moments befitting a sagacious producer who knows his craft inside out: the epiphany just past the halfway point of “The Wilhelm Scream,” when the music drops out to introduce a droning organ sound; the crescendo that carries “I Never Learnt to Share” skyward before abruptly bringing everything back to ground level. The subsequent two-song suite is graceful and well executed, and auto-tuned vocals punctuated by gaps of silence create suspense until gentle guitar strumming eases “Lindisfarne” into its second part. The magnetism of the maneuver is undeniable.
His minimalist take on Feist’s “Limit To Your Love” highlights the song’s poetry, and Blake adds startlingly grave bass wobbles that simply cannot be appreciated on laptop speakers. Although Blake’s sound was influenced by dubstep’s early progenitors, “I Mind” is the closest thing here to “dubstep” in its current iteration.
After the string of EPs Blake released in 2010, the musical prodigy on display here isn’t surprising. The revelation of James Blake is the aching, palpable humanity he has imparted through his songwriting.
Blake’s lyrics consist mainly of earnest declarations of vulnerability. His pining on “The Wilhelm Scream”—“I don’t know about my dreams/I don’t know about my dreaming anymore/All that I know is I’m falling, falling, falling”—encapsulates the confusion, apprehension and choking sense of loss brought to bear.
James Blake brings two recent classics to mind: Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight for its brilliant economy and Burial’s Untrue for its uncanny evocative powers. Like those artists, Blake refines and distills the sounds that preceded him in order to produce something even simpler, yet somehow avant-garde.
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