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There’s a stillness in everything Blake does, and he knows how to deploy that marvel of a voice in ways that absolutely change the atmosphere of a room. They all touch the same parts of your soul. The album moves between electronic reveries and stripped-back piano-and-voice ballads, and they all sound completely cohesive. Blake’s sense of control, his instinct for when to build a track and when to let silence do the talking, is on another level right now. We’re all still in first-impression territory right now, but The Colour In Anything is just a staggeringly, maddeningly pretty piece of work. And on The Colour In Anything, Blake takes everything Overgrown did and he does it better. But Overgrown turned out to be a precedent-setting modern classic, rearranging the sound of pop music to the point where Blake, against all odds, came to replace Coldplay’s Chris Martin as every rapper’s favorite doofy English singer.
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Those early EPs had left such a bad taste in my mouth that I had to hear “Retrograde” and “Life Round Here” soundtrack a few dozen TV montages before I could hear it as the tranquil, assured space-age make-out music that it was. In retrospect, Blake’s transition from labored-blorp productions to soul-futurist singer-songwriterdom was fairly gradual, starting with his Feist cover and leading into 2013’s fantastic sophomore album Overgrown. Certain wings of the music-criticism establishment were losing their shit over this kid, and I would throw on one of those EPs and immediately get a headache. When a fresh-faced Blake arrived on the scene a few years ago, he was making futzy, abstract post-dubstep music, and I could not understand it at all. The idea that I am leading with a Bill Withers video - that Bill Withers video - in a James Blake review is not the kind of thing I could’ve anticipated.
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It comes from a universe entirely different from the one that once produced Withers, and yet it arrives at the same place, emotionally. And like Withers, Blake is making an inward, personal form of soul music - albeit one that, in Blake’s case, sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a vast digital canyon. Just like Withers, he lets go of any idea of conventional song-structure, letting the lines bubble up whenever it feels right. And yet Blake, through his own process, manages to evoke a similar sense of deep, crushing isolation. It would be ridiculous to say that Blake’s reading of those Withers lines is as good as Withers’ version nothing is as good as Withers’ version. His own voice drops in and out, sometimes massing into a platoon of James Blakes, sometimes flitting around in the corners of the track. Instead of that one spare guitar, he’s got this beautifully arranged minimal ice-sculpture of a beat. It sounds different coming from Blake, of course - a beautiful, young white Englishman with this frozen, clean tenor. James Blake opens The Colour In Anything, his new album, with those same two lines, taken from Withers’ song. It’s one of my favorite performances ever. “We lived and loved with each other so long.” On “me” and “long,” he stretches the words out until they’re wounded-foghorn sounds. “I can’t believe that she don’t wanna see me,” he sings. “Hope She’ll Be Happier” is a grown-up song, a song about acceptance and desolation, about realizing you were a chapter in someone else’s life and that chapter is over. So by the time he got around to releasing that first album, he sounded like a man, like someone who’d been through some things.
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Up until three years earlier, he’d been a factory worker, and before that, a sailor in the Navy. He’s already 36, but he’s new to this R&B-stardom thing. He’s on a stool, picking out a little three-note melody on an acoustic guitar and singing “Hope She’ll Be Happier,” one of the songs from Just As I Am, his debut album. He’s up there by himself, showing no sign that he even notices the thousands upon thousands of people watching him. It’s Bill Withers, onstage in a stadium in Zaire in 1974.