JAMES BLAKE - S/T
Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 04:00PM 
In the world of sports, there's a term for young players whose raw potential balances out their often naively bad decisions and one-dimensional play. It's known as having an "upside". A good upside is why a general manager will seemingly risk a team's future on a slight kid with no defensive skills but a devastatingly quick snapshot and an unflappable go-to deke. The bet is that with proper nurturing, the kid could become a superstar. But he could also remain a nifty shot and little else.
Right now, the blogosphere is seeing the upside to young Brit James Blake, and everyone wants in on the action. With good reason. Over the course of a few EPs and singles, Blake's approach to the cavernous, patiently shuddering world of dubstep has grown in leaps and bounds—each new release suggesting an impressive understanding of how to manipulate technology, while also displaying sound and daringly naked skills as a singer. After teasing with his confidently abridged slo-mo version of Feist's "Limit To Your Love" late last year, bets were on for his debut full-length to be this year's The xx—a chilled-out, dark and moody Anglo urban pop hybrid that reached listeners across the public spectrum.
For the most part, it is: numerous reviews have already and will continue to praise the record's confidently eloquent composure, dazzlingly gorgeous production, and overall refusal to bend to common notions of what a 'song' is. And yet, it's with that last point that I think the hype surrounding Blake must be taken soberly: for his sake as much as our own.
The guy is a total wunderkind and his debut sounds fantastic. It pushes dubstep into intriguing and—for some of the young genre's purists—controversial places. But he’s not much of a songwriter.
Of the 11 tracks on James Blake, less than half have anything resembling a verse/chorus structure, often choosing to follow Blake’s rule of thumb: find a sentence or two that you like, and repeat it forever. Fine, you say? That's the point?
I suppose. After all, only last year Four Tet's excellent There Is Love In You featured numerous tracks very successfully based around cutting and splicing a single vocal hook. And from Jim O'Rourke to LCD Soundsystem to old Delta blues singers, plenty of artists have the played the game of getting a lot out of very few words. But when the words in question are a couplet as maudlin as "My brother and my sister don’t speak to me/but I don’t blame them", it takes a certain kind of patience to get through a song that repeats them nine times in a row.
By focusing so much on vocals on his debut, Blake is opening himself to this sort of scrutiny. To his credit, he works very hard to assure the listener that it's the technique with which he delivers his minimal text that is most important. The song in question above, "I Never Learnt To Share", is introduced with an ever-building set of harmonies that would make most neo-soul singers weep with jealousy. "Lindisfarne I & II" pitch-shifts and roboticizes its vocals to a blissful binary oblivion—like a haunting ballad for the garbage-sorting robot from Wall-E. On "I Mind" he samples himself into alluring aural knots, wriggling his way free at the tightest moments with the ease of a magician. Again and again, Blake subjects his rather beautiful voice to a digital bruising, and these sounds convey emotion a hell of lot better than the words themselves.
None of these quibbles can hide the fact that this record is quite unbelievably beautiful and inventive. I love it immensely. But still, like a 20-year-old hotshot winger with a lethal shot, it pays in the long run to analyze a rookie's shortcomings while acknowledging his natural talent. Perhaps a savvy 'vet' like Caribou holds an example of how an electronic artist can improve as a songwriter without ever becoming stagnant and bending fully to its rules. James Blake's upside is huge. He could be the Antony or Jeff Buckley of dubstep. But if he's not careful, he could just as easily be its James Blunt.
Reader Comments (1)
nice seeing a bit of perspective on his potential, good review!