If you were reading in the right places last year, then you caught some of James Blake’s buzz. He released a series of EPs that took steps farther and farther away from the closest genre to which he could have been attached – dubstep, a genre that has been constantly shifting, expanding and mutating in its near-decade of existence. And yet it wasn’t even close to adequate in attempting to pigeonhole just what James Blake sounds like.
To be honest, I have never encountered an artist who has been harder to describe than James Blake. The easiest way I can think of is to distinguish it from everything else. I may be alone in this, but I feel like any time I listen to music, it has a sense of place. With any music with live instruments, one can always hear the studio in which it’s recorded – the space that any instrument’s sound fills. Even in electronic music, vocals ring the way they do, and I like to envision synthesizers as belonging to the stage, or even a machine. James Blake’s music sounds like it’s taking place in absolute nothingness.
Perhaps the closest thing to Blake’s trademark is his willingness to have only one or two sounds in music, and very sparse sounds at that. One echoing piano note, one soft handclap with no echo whatsoever. Even, sometimes, full seconds of absolute silence – they all stand relatively alone, and the overall feel is so close it borders on claustrophobic. Think of any movie when the point of view is set inside an astronaut’s helmet, or in Ben’s snorkel in The Graduate, with only the breathing and soundless images. The breathing always sounds unnaturally heavy, doesn’t it? Well, James Blake is the only musical equivalent to that feeling that I’ve found.
What sets his eponymous, debut full-length album apart from his previous work is the incorporation of real, human vocals, not just alien-sounding samples. It’s downright unfair that someone with this kind of compositional talent also has a beautiful, angelic voice. It sounds like Antony without the dramatic affects. It almost sounds like it belongs in a church, but it’s too soulful for that. Maybe a Gospel church, but even that is pushing it.
Despite all my efforts to set him apart from any other musician, there is one other album James Blake’s debut reminds me of – Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago. But that’s only in the emotional sense. Both are incredibly insular pieces of work, sounding like you’re holding a microphone through a keyhole, listening to someone singing to themselves on their bed with their eyes closed.
But Bon Iver surrounded his otherworldly voice with a guitar, a drum set and some basic studio tricks. James Blake, on the other hand, uses only a piano, the most basic, dry synth sound, and a precious few clicks, muffled kick drums, and conga hits, which largely stay in the background. The only times the percussion comes to the foreground are in two of the best songs on the album: “Limit To Your Love,” which manages to be straightforward piano pop while perfectly fitting as the album’s centerpiece, and “I Mind,” which stretches out the title phrase into an endless, pulsing string that comprises the main melody (countered by the same words, briefly sung every few measures), and in which a relatively relaxed 2-step beat stands out as the most exuberant, and perhaps the only danceable moment on the whole album.
What’s interesting, and what may turn some away from this album, is that despite how vocal-centric the album is, no song has more than four or so lines of lyrics, and all of the lines (that I can understand, at least) are filled with regret, sadness and longing. The void of lyrical depth and variation is filled with manipulation of James Blake’s voice itself. Some parts of the album sound like Auto-Tune’s fever dreams. Others, like the second half of “Limit To Your Love” and the exemplar for this whole paragraph, “I Never Learnt To Share,” pitch-shift the vocals both to create ethereal harmonies and to bounce off of each other in fugue.
As a listening experience, James Blake is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. The combination of futuristic soul singing and relentless experimentation with the boundaries of sound and silence has the potential to make everything else sound unsatisfying. I can’t imagine listening to anything more than this over the coming year. I would say that this will wind up being influential, but it’s hard to imagine this kind of music existing anywhere outside of a pair of headphones, and the tiny world James Blake built inside of them.
