Review Summary: An interesting concept, but marred by a lack of focus in songwriting and emotional investment.
This album is one mighty baffling listen if you ask me. Blake is not baffled though; on the contrary, he has a clear direction to his music, which is the merging of dubstep and electronic music in general with soul crooning. An interesting direction I might add, and very fresh sounding actually. Plus, he knows how to build intimidating soundscapes, but using a very minimalistic approach and you have one of the most promising artists of this century.
On to the songs now; I used the word ‘baffling’ at the beginning. Well, the reason the record is a baffling listening experience is the songs' structure. The songwriting here is very loose and abstract; there is no real form to the songs, as the vocal melodies are seemingly improvised for the most part. The chord progressions are very interesting though, dark, haunting and naturally complement the minimalism of the production. And the arrangements usually consist of sparse piano playing, overloaded bass, synthesizer and electronic drum beats, with some subdued acoustic guitar lines appearing on
Digital Lion, for instance. Finally, the tempo on most of these songs is slow or moderate, giving room for his vocal stretching.
But the record, despite the terrific atmosphere it builds up, does not deliver that much on an emotional level. Blake sings subtly without overdoing the matter or stepping in soul clichés, but there is no true substance to the songs.
Our Love Comes Back is a perfect example of this defect of the album. It starts quietly with an accompanying and Blake sings adequately, but the song goes nowhere. It is not sad, happy, thought-provoking, bombastic, humble or anything like that. It is just an atmospheric, aural and abstract affair without any concise aim to any emotional state. It’s sort of like background music; seeking to drive the listener through a sonic 'environment', but not actually letting him
live in that environment.
Now, the songwriting on the record is, as I stated earlier, based on loose and free-form melodies which theoretically is nice, but doesn’t make the songs memorable or interesting. There are nice vocal twists and turns by Blake in all of the songs and some of them actually have some sort of structure, but for the most part the concentration is given on
how he sings the notes and not what notes are sung. Of course, phrasing is very important in improvisation (or faked improvisation, I still can’t understand whether he actually composed the majority of the tracks), but you need to have some interesting motifs as well. Blake’s phrasing is very good and he has an apparently big range (
Dim for example alternates between low baritone notes and sweet falsetto’s with remarkable ease), but he is seriously monochromatic in his delivery. Every song has the same routine as far as Blake’s performance goes; baritone, falsetto and slow, lethargic vibratos.
The best songs here lie on the first twenty minutes of the album, minus
Take A Fall For Me which wasted a potentially great pair-up with RZA, of Wu-Tang Clan. For me, the best song on the record is definitely
Overgrown, featuring the best melody on the record, the best(so far) performance by James Blake and it hints at actual emotions. Second is the famous single
Retrograde which is more or less similar to the title track in, well, everything. And I also hold a soft spot for
I Am Sold despite having laughable lyrics in the likes of:
And we lay, nocturnal, Speculate what we feel. Why waste a good hook for these pretentious ‘deep’ lyrics?
The focus, in the end, lies more on atmosphere and sonic beauty rather than emotion, introspection (as I’ve read) and solid songwriting. There is nothing on this album to convince me that James Blake is a fully fledged out and mature artist yet to deserve the praise he gets from every critic around. Anyway, if you heard the aforementioned three tracks, then you’ve heard Overgrown. The rest, while interesting in their own right, are rather nice background music, than solid compositions with a purpose.
