PeeP on PoP- James Blake

James Blake- James Blake (A&M/Atlas- 2011)

~by Gabe McBride

81___                             

Just want to put out there, right off the top, I don’t know from dubstep. I couldn’t identify a discernable difference between grime, jungle (is that a thing?) or trip-hop. All that aside, James Blake is pretty intriguing. I am an electro music novice, at best, and I hear a ton of Kid A in the record, with its hollowed out synth chords and unstable, minimalist vocals, that frequently descend into nothingness, or a close approximation of it. Some of the time anyway. There’s a strong R&B influence on some of the songs, especially  when Blake sits at the piano and belts it out, as on his cover of Feist’s ‘Limit to Your Love’, although this track like much of the record, the bass throbs and threatens menacingly.

The heart of James Blake is in the dyad ‘Lindisfarne 1’ and ‘Lindisfarne 2’. The first half is Blake singing almost entirely  a capella, through a vocoder, with some short, muted electro notes that come in briefly for a few seconds toward the end of the track. The song almost disintegrates  into nothingness at least three times and comes to a complete halt with seven seconds left, before his voice interjects again, throwing in a final, indecipherable thought. ‘Lindisfarne 2’ is probably the most upbeat track on the record, and Blake sounds unapologetically joyful, soulful, and devotional. Just as on ‘1’, the vocals are masked through layers of code, piled on each other, and, as in other songs here, he accompanies himself three or four times. It’s heady stuff, and I have purposely avoided looking up lyrics online, as the tone of James Blake is vastly more interesting than what he might be saying. And I think, I think, there might be some dubstep in there. 

For Fans of: Burial, Antony and the Johnsons