"Crease your pride, telling lies, that you're not on your own."
Such an interesting confluence of hype, expectation and originality, James Blake's debut album will inevitably disappoint those who prefer their enigmas cut into nice palatable bites. Rather, Blake chooses to hold back easy revelations and resolutions in order to deceptively force the listener into more oblique, marginal, minimalist soundcsapes. In the process, he borrows (overly) familiar elements from genres such as Dub-Step, R&B, and Soul but turns them inside out, creating beautiful grotesques that seem simultaneously familiar and insistently disorienting. However, Blake does occasionally strip away all the abstraction, relying only on voice and piano, and here he can sound a little like Chris Martin sans all the sappiness. Clearly, Blake's at his best when inhabiting the margins of a song, foregrounding the seams and stress points, masterfully twisting expectations to take the listener somewhere less comfortable, even occasionally uncanny.
James Blake
1. Unluck (3:00)
2. The Wilhelm Scream (4:37)
3. I Never Learnt to Share (4:52)
4. Lindisfarne I (2:42)
5. Lindisfarne II (3:02)
6. Limit to Your Love (4:37)
7. Give Me My Month (1:56)
8. To Care (Like You) (3:53)
9. Why Don't You Call Me (1:36)
10. I Mind (3:31)
11. Measurements (4:20)
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