The Pitchfork Kid

What to make of James Blake? The simple facts are these: James Blake is a twenty-three year old musician, British, and Pitchfork.com, the indie music mecca, loves him dearly. Within the last year he has managed to release three EP's and last month he capped it all off with the release of his debut album, the self-titled James Blake.

Just like his three previous EP's, Blake's debut album is a remarkably dense work. James Blake isn't an album to crack in a single listen and discard. Even now, it's nearly impossible to define the album after a half a dozen listens. It somehow manages to mix electronic, soul, and some R&B elements into 38 minutes. To add onto that further, Blake's voice is distorted on nearly every track of the album. The electronic sounds are fractured and manipulated yet noticeably cohesive. A few of the songs at the tail end of the album were so strange and splintered that on my first listen they made me check to see if my iPod was skipping.

What will keep the listeners interested in the album is Blake's unique production combined with the diverse use of his voice. Electronics whirr and echo severely on one song and then the next song will include layered A capella with seemingly a dozen samples of itself. Then, in the next song he'll sit down at the piano and sing, no distortion whatsoever, completely contrasting everything prior. 

Blake's voice manages to be one of the most soulful I have heard among any musician of our generation. His cover of Feist's "Limit to Your Love" is an absolutely gorgeous song, and it's impossible not to double take when you realize that it's a twenty-three year old British kid singing. It's a shame he had to hide his gifted voice under so much distortion on most of the album, but after a while you begin to understand that James Blake wouldn't have worked if he had gone that route.

The album begins to shed its layers after multiple listens. A great example would be when Blake is singing about falling in "Wilhelm Scream", where he manipulates his voice to sound as if he is literally falling. Also, with "I Never Learnt To Share," where Blake's voice is endlessly layered and sampled, Blake is setting up the listener to realize that his voice is merely another instrument for him to manipulate. These discoveries go on and on, but the real fun of it is finding all of the intricacies of the album for one's self.

It's easy to see why James Blake is so beloved and raved by Pitchfork. He is out there musically, but at the same time he brings in all of the core ideas from different genres and reinvents them for his own purposes. It'll be interesting to see how Blake evolves, and also to see if he can keep the ridiculous pace he has set for himself in the last year. Until that next record or EP, people will still be pouring over his debut, and, most likely, still trying to figure it all out.