The music has a particular speed and shape consisting of fizzing, soul-tingly sounds and dubstep templates. An effect that leaves you in front of a bonfire on a freezing November evening, a shallow glow of warmth which gives you goose-bumps and shivers. Nothing alike the dubstep wobble brothers, Caspa and Rusko, (and that’s a warning, in strict comparison this would be an anaemic record of dance music for queer fairies) Blakes songs are bent and melted by technology with a different consequence. Rather than singer-songwriter simplicity, Blake has manufactured forms of Blues, Folk and gospel through a modern conveyor belt of synths, sequencers, vocoders and drum machines. The final products are stripped and isolated sounds of frigidity consisting of single bass thumps, echoing pings and single distorted synth. His Bon Iver-esque singing often conveys an emotional turmoil, a mesmerizing, rhythmic heartbreak that builds out of stark simplicity in a discordant crescendo of skittering basslines and reverberating synthetics. The occasional distorted vocals blend beyond intelligible to become part of the instrumentation.
This could all be perceived as gimmick production but his bare scrubby lyrics join perfectly with his production. James Blake’s album is one to engulf in, in a sea of cotton and smoke. In other words, to appreciate his music, it’s best to envelope yourself with comfort, imaginings and a pair of fantastic speakers.
Blake doesn’t necessarily paint a picture with his music, he holds up a shattered broken mirror for the listener to look into