‘Put That Away And Talk To Me’ is one of a few occasions when his love is directed towards his own craft and self, but he’s largely concerned with his romantic life. Spurts of dazzling synths close the track, a nod to the textures on his first album, channelling cold turkey-induced delirium. “Could you tell me about the early days?” flickers the pitched-up sample, a spark through the haze that registers Blake’s message.
The song turns out to be one of Blake’s most sincere pieces of writing as he confronts a version of himself that he no longer knows, a recluse hidden behind a cloud of weed who runs away from self-expression, as he told interviewers recently. Downcast humour is also present on ‘Put That Away And Talk To Me’, titled with a wink and a smirk that’s sure to elicit mixed reactions. The title track is solely piano, opening with wistful metaphors about British weather before Blake wells up: “On your island, there’s no weather warning / There’s no sudden showers / There’s no certain powers, no / All I wanted was to carry you for aching.” The teary-eyed resignation that follows is matched by the consolations of the piano and Blake’s own layered harmonies. While working on the album, Blake often began writing songs at the piano, a process that becomes evident over the course of the 17 tracks. Every track explores a different sentiment, making what was already an unnerving prospect, with its 76-minute duration, into a sprawling, emotionally exhausting anthology of intimacy. The love he explores through his music is complex, its facets numerous. The other major interview around the album highlighted how his newfound happiness and inspiration hinge on his unnamed, unsung partner. For Blake, the colour in anything is love. This time there’s an assuredness to match his delicacy, like first encountering Gandalf the White in the forest, recovered from his eternal falling, falling, falling. Talking to Pitchfork recently, he explained how his earlier music only shared certain parts of his character, exacerbating his negativity.
On his third album, The Colour In Anything, Blake is more like himself than ever before.
“Blake has never howled so triumphantly as on this record” But since his fatefully self-titled debut, it’s as if Blake has been pushed and pulled between these different perceptions and dismissals of his music, denied his multiplicity both by others and himself. His most acclaimed music has struck a balance between electronic production and his singer-songwriter tendencies, a formula perfected on his debut album with ‘Unluck’ and ‘I Never Learnt to Share’ and later expanded on Overgrown’s ‘Retrograde’. Yet his own collaborations, with RZA and Chance The Rapper on tracks from 2013’s Mercury Prize-winning Overgrown, have felt awkward more than anything. From his impact on countless bedroom producers to world-beaters like Drake and Kanye West, and particularly through his alliance with the hip-hop’s other in-demand indie voice, Justin Vernon, Blake has been an unassuming Forrest Gump: ever-present at musical flash points while his own quest for emotional resolution continues. Since his early EPs, pivotal releases on Hessle Audio, Hemlock and R&S that helped spawn an amorphous dubstep sound, and his first album, propelled by a sub-bass retooling of Feist’s ‘Limit To Your Love’, the British singer, songwriter and producer’s influence has been felt across the spectrum. Say James Blake’s name into a mirror five times and you can’t be sure which one will appear – the pianist with the mumbled falsetto, the inadvertent figurehead of ‘post-dubstep’, or the songwriter wanted by everyone from Frank Ocean to Beyoncé. On his third album he finally finds his true voice, writes Tayyab Amin. The post-dubstep poster boy has left a trail of personalities since his late ’00s emergence: dance producer, downbeat balladeer, and more recently pop star ghostwriter.