Defying all assumptions of how the music industry works in its upper echelons, James Blake – a pale lanky English guy who started off making progressive dubstep on tiny independent dance labels – has become virtual pop royalty. He’s written and appeared on songs with Beyonce and Drake and collaborated with Frank Ocean and Bon Iver. The anomaly of Blake can be explained by how he has essentially bridged to gap between the vocoder heavy, American rap productions that now dominate mainstream music, and then applied it to the context of British electronic dance culture. It was a perfect fit even though his music has always felt it’s designed for your headphones instead of in a club. Part of what was briefly known as ‘Night Bus’, electronic music meant for the journey back after the club, in a limited space where the line between evening and morning has disappeared. Blake’s music lives in this mysterious time rather than to be enjoyed on the dance floor. On The Colour in Anything we’re still in Blakes’ world of perpetual nighttime, the sun just on the cusp of beginning to rise and the city is so quiet the loudest thing you can hear are the bird songs.

In his early production James Blakes’ vocals began as samples. Small impressionistic splashes of the human voice dripped over the tracks. Even though now he’s properly singing, his melodies still maintain the logic of samples. On opener ‘Radio Silence’ he sings in short phrases that are used alternately to build up the songs. Likewise the piano parts abruptly cut off at the end of a bar before the note can decay naturally, lending them an air of artificiality. In contrast, it’s the less organic sounds that have a more natural sense of movement and transition. They move the songs along while the acoustic instruments – mainly his vocal and piano parts – circle round, dropping in and out. He’s always had a knack for manipulating his voice to serve different functions. On songs such as ‘Noise Above our Heads’ and ‘Choose Me’, these short vocal snippets – sometimes the looped last vowel of a line – become the rhythmic backbone of the songs, while the synths build to a crescendo. The opening croon on ‘Love me in Whatever Way’ sounds like a mournful saxophone in some jazz standard.

As is often the case on a James Blake album, there are at least one or two songs where all the production is stripped back and we’re taken back to what is the root of his sound, a man and his piano. And on The Colour in Anything this quota is filled by ‘f.o.r.e.v.e.r’, a beautifully simple ballad, full of observations almost microscopic on their level of sensitivity: “notice just how slow the killer bee’s wings beat / and how wonderful you are”.

Blake’s lyrics often resemble snippets of a conversation or inchoate thoughts rather than a clear narrative. They have often felt like something of an afterthought for Blake, but on The Colour in Anything these ambiguous glimpses can be evocative despite the small amount of information they give us. On ‘Choose Me’ he pleads: “You don’t weigh me down like you think you do”. From just this small detail, we’re magically able to fill in the space to create the whole image of the relationship. How he feels, how she feels, where they’ve been and where they are.

It’s this impressionistic quality to Blake’s music that often makes it so fascinatingly difficult to unravel how exactly he manages to create the effect he does while seemingly using so little. Everything is suggestion or inference. Inspected up close each part can make little sense, it’s only once you step back and take it all in at once that the gaps are magically filled and the whole, luscious image becomes clear. ‘Two Men Down’ is punctured by a noise that sometimes sounds like a pop, sometimes a manipulated dog bark. ‘Timeless’, a delicate motif, gives way to a siren-like noise. There’s nothing melodic about these sounds, and they should stick out like sore thumb on his delicate, futuristic R’n’B, but somehow they fit in effortlessly, their presence barely felt.

At seventeen tracks and over 75 minutes long, The Colour in Anything is a lot to take in and at no point does it veer away from what you might expect a James Blake album to sound. From the instrumentation, to the delicacy of future soul production, to his trademark warble, everything about his trademark sound is in place. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t an album full of achingly beautiful moments, and can make your heart swell with just an expected change in a chord progression.
Louis Ormesher

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