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James Blake - Overgrown

James Blake’s second album, Overgrown (2013) is all about distance, both spatial and rational. Disparate elements slot neatly into singular sonic spaces, but twist and collide as if existence depended on a whirlwind game of hide and seek, centred around restrained, gospel- and jazz-influenced piano.

Blake’s voice has the focused timbre of a reed instrument. This is most notable in the precisely sculpted envelopes of the ascending vocal riff in lead single “Retrograde”. The track begins with this riff, which is then looped behind the lead vocal. Reverb obfuscates and extends the space occupied by Blake’s voice: from the moment the vocal lines are offset, the twin voices flutter between intimacy and distance, and at times the tiny cupboard of the beginning opens into a big reverberant hall. A pitchy rising analogue synth (repeated on “Voyeur”) heightens this spatial uncertainty.

On Blake’s eponymous first album, his soulful vocals provoked an easy emotional investment in the music. But on Overgrown, vocals are painted with cool reverb, and sit behind muted beats that push listeners back to arm’s length. This treatment makes for a self-consciously cerebral listening experience.

The title track is lyrically dense and structurally uncomplicated. Heavy tuned electronic percussion thuds beneath a sustained synthesiser that whines like an old taxi, foreshadowing heavy brass chords. On “Digital Lion” (featuring Brian Eno) a sliced, icepick-distorted vocal sample serves as a hi-hat, and throughout the song short vocal samples are used on top of long rising pads and slowly raked acoustic guitar. At times during Overgrown, Blake abandons keyboard instruments and relies exclusively on layers and layers of vocals for harmonic movement.

Blake’s loose analogue synthesisers sound strange when compared with the tightly pitched, endlessly doubled sequences of much contemporary popular music. This characteristic doubling—where the same melodic line is overlaid using a different timbre—gives lead lines a “big” sound. But it means vocals require similar treatment, which—in my opinion—has contributed to the ubiquity of digital pitch correction software like Auto-Tune, due to the difficulty of singing a perfect double. Because of the sparse arrangements featured in Overgrown, Blake only ever has to overdub for effect, like in the dramatic, muddled ending of the title track, and it always feels chaotic.

These moments where restraint is abandoned are the best; they conjure a dyslexic soundscape at odds with Blake’s normally anal-retentive layering of sound. Blake’s vocals interrupt and obscure rapper RZA’s lyrics in the palimpsestic “Take A Fall For Me”, an internet collaboration for which they never actually met in real life. Final track “Our Love Comes Back”, a return to man-at-a-piano songwriting, uses a dark, high-register piano, ponderous bass and cascading white noise in a way that recalls brushed-snare, rainy-day jazz.

Overgrown is beautiful and interesting. Blake’s arrangements and instrumentation are almost painfully restrained; as a result, the album sometimes feels cold and lonely. But moments of chaos recall the haphazard stylings of 2011’s James Blake, bringing enough warmth to counterbalance the cerebral nature of Blake’s music making.

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