James Blake
Amazon has gone to great lengths to prove he's a fighter, not a lover. Or, at least, someone who can see battle lines in any artistic pursuit-- in between "CMYK" playing chicken with sample clearance lawsuits and his fears over the purity of dubstep, there was 2011's James Blake, an album where he wrote songs (well, some of them) and sang them while appearing extremely uncomfortable with the connotations of "singer-songwriter". They were pretty, but goddamn, were they serious.
Maybe he's mellowed with age: "Retrograde", the first single from the forthcoming Overgrown, is a straight-up soul crooner where his characteristic production details are still in place, but they're in the service of arrangement rather than disorientation. Those wordless falsetto curlicues recall none other than D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar", as the snap of the snare suggests that this is the sort of steady pop you typically get from ?uestlove. Even though the same buzz-synths from "Unluck" and "I Never Learnt To Share" reappear, their jutting points are shorn off. And his big vocal trick isn't some kind of electronic manipulation, but rather an heretofore unheard lower register where he intones, "We're alone now." Hell, it may just be a love song and another subtle attack to anyone who thought he was simply an interpretor rather than a songwriter capable of giving the public his own "Limit To Your Love." "Retrograde" sweetly says, "Yeah, I can do that too."
Amazon has gone to great lengths to prove he's a fighter, not a lover. Or, at least, someone who can see battle lines in any artistic pursuit-- in between "CMYK" playing chicken with sample clearance lawsuits and his fears over the purity of dubstep, there was 2011's James Blake, an album where he wrote songs (well, some of them) and sang them while appearing extremely uncomfortable with the connotations of "singer-songwriter". They were pretty, but goddamn, were they serious.
Maybe he's mellowed with age: "Retrograde", the first single from the forthcoming Overgrown, is a straight-up soul crooner where his characteristic production details are still in place, but they're in the service of arrangement rather than disorientation. Those wordless falsetto curlicues recall none other than D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar", as the snap of the snare suggests that this is the sort of steady pop you typically get from ?uestlove. Even though the same buzz-synths from "Unluck" and "I Never Learnt To Share" reappear, their jutting points are shorn off. And his big vocal trick isn't some kind of electronic manipulation, but rather an heretofore unheard lower register where he intones, "We're alone now." Hell, it may just be a love song and another subtle attack to anyone who thought he was simply an interpretor rather than a songwriter capable of giving the public his own "Limit To Your Love." "Retrograde" sweetly says, "Yeah, I can do that too."
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