Album: James Blake – Overgrown

Released: 8th April 2013

Republic

9/10

The current British music scene is saturated with tedious singer-songwriters that clog up the radio waves with simplistic, unimaginative three-chord guitar songs relying on worn-out clichés that cater for the lowest common denominator.

Then there is James Blake. As a post-dubstep producer, Blake has an innate ability to create swirling tornadoes of sound to surround rhythmic beats, as was displayed perfectly by 2010’s ‘CMYK’ and ‘Klavierwerke’ EPs. His 2011 self-titled album, however, displayed a different side to Blake. He managed to marry the rhythmic post-dubstep sounds he had managed to create on his earlier EPs with a soulful, Joni Mitchell-influenced singer-songwriting capability, demonstrated by his fantastic reworking of Feist’s ‘Limit To Your Love’. This ability has not deserted Blake, and remains to be a strong influence on his latest release: Overgrown.

One such example of James Blake’s soulful mastering of meaningful, heartrending lyrics with post-dubstep is the album’s title track, which questions the culture of impermanence of meaning. Blake expresses a deep, and perhaps futile wish to mean something that is not just a temporary occurrence, to not just be “a star, a stone on the shore”, to not just create something with meaning in a particular moment, but instead to create something that has a lasting emotional impact.

In an interview in 2010, Matt Berninger of The National stated how music should be vague, allowing it to be open to the interpretation of the listener. After all, all the meaning of songs is created in the minds of the listeners. James Blake is an expert at this musical impressionism, in creating deliberately vague statements, often repeated and surrounded by pulsating pops and clicks, allowing the listener to apply individual meaning, and therefore emotional power to the songs.

However, James Blake is certainly not as subtle in his public statements as he is in his songwriting. In an interview in 2011 with The Boston Phoenix, Blake laid into the current state of dubstep, arguing that ‘Brostep’ artists had hijacked the genre that had previously been about creating nuanced sounds by creating music that is about “who can make the dirtiest, filthiest bass sound, almost like a pissing competition.”

It cannot be denied that Overgrown has some quite incredible musical moments. ‘Life Around Here’ provides a heartfelt exposition of emotion, with post-dubstep swirling around the repetition of “Part time love is a life around here, everything feels like touchdown on a rainy day”, slowly building to a climactic crescendo.

The album also includes numerous collaborations with other artists. One such guest appearance is from Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA on ‘Take A Fall For Me’. In the song, RZA raps over Blake’s expert musical production, making for a creation that is not dissimilar to his 2012 collaboration with Trim on ‘Confidence Boost’, using the Harmonimix moniker. However, Blake’s RZA collaboration does not make the same impact as ‘Confidence Boost’ did. Whereas the Trim collaboration intently moved towards a climax, ‘Take A Fall For Me’ does not. Both the music and lyrics seem stuck in a rut that they cannot emerge from, rendering the song seemingly lacking in any definite direction.

Another of Blake’s collaborations on Overgrown is on ‘Digital Lion’ with Brian Eno, formerly of Roxy Music, and more recently a producer for numerous musicians, including Coldplay’s two most recent albums (the less said about that the better), seven U2 albums, and three Talking Heads albums. ‘Digital Lion’ is excellently produced, with a bouncy beat, encircled by what could be mistaken for the sounds of a UFO landing nearby, and complemented by Blake’s sublimely soulful voice.

The most immediate song on Overgrown is also the leading single of the album – ‘Retrograde’. This song represents all that is brilliant about James Blake. It combines the looping of an intoxicating riff with the immensely powerful lyrics Blake is famed for. The song conveys a feeling of abject loneliness and heartbreak, but also of confusion – “Suddenly I’m hit. Is this darkness or the dawn? When your friends are gone, and your friends won’t come.” Blake has stated in interviews that the song is about falling in love, but it is clearly not a love song. It perfectly illustrates the confusion and apprehensiveness of love, and the loneliness that inevitably accompanies it.

Overgrown can therefore only be viewed as a starkly, and often frighteningly introspective and emotional album. It is, without doubt a considerable step away from James Blake’s 2011 self-titled debut album, and is much closer to his ‘Enough Thunder’ EP. Thus, it represents a shuffling away from voice-driven, often minimalistic songwriting demonstrated in ‘Lindisfarne’, and towards a more electronically driven sound. However, Blake has not abandoned his singer-songwriting influences, returning to the piano and voice combination on ‘DLM’, which has distinct echoes of Blake’s sublimely beautiful cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’. As stated by Zane Lowe in the interview in which Blake announced Overgrown, there simply are no other artists creating the same kind of twisted, emotionally complex music, making James Blake a unique contribution to music.