Sean: So have you noticed that “Give Me My Month” sounds like an Aaron Neville song?
Danny: There is a heavy soul influence. That’s pretty striking, considering how soulless this sort of music can be. This is practically verging on gospel.
S: On that one track, his voice sounds very much like Aaron Neville to me.
D: The first time I heard him sing, I was shocked by how good his voice was. It has this really rich mix of delicacy and emotion, much like the record itself.
S: In terms of timbre, definitely. He plays the two extremes off of one another very well. On one hand, airless machine sounds. On the other, hyper-emotive soul vocals.
D: Sometimes within the same song, and yet it comes off as totally organic.
S: It reminds me of ’80s music in that context. Not the bright, sugary music that’s been in vogue again recently, but the darker post-punk and melancholy synthpop.
D: A reach back to that dark insularity, somewhere between Joy Division and New Order.
S: Exactly. It has a clear Factory Records vibe. I think of this record as a dialogue between a soul singer and his computer. I’ve started to imagine that his computer is the object in all the songs too.
D: it reminds me of the video for Björk’s “All is Full of Love.” Love and robots.
S: Love and robots! They’ve both managed to find the beatific within the cold and electronic, which is why I think it resonates so much with me.
D: The very obvious comparison though is Burial’s Untrue. I’m wondering how you think this compares.
S: I hadn’t considered that. I can definitely see it though, with a much clearer vocal personality, and less like the ghost of a rave.
D: This strikes me as a very direct descendant. James Blake to me is like a warmer, more humanist Burial. The Shepard Fairey to Burial’s Banksy.
S: But Blake is much sadder. It’s personalized. Burial is more diffused through the invocation of place.
D: Although it’s probably heretical among critics to admit this, I far prefer the Blake.
S: I do too.
D: Burial to me is too murky and ghostly. By design, but still…
S: I love Burial, don’t get me wrong, but I can see myself listening to this much more often.
D: This is distant, and yet feels so close at the same time.
S: The warmth of his voice and the hyper-stylized R&B singing make for a much more human and organic sort of record. It’s the human filtered through the machine rather than being overwhelmed by it.
D: I totally agree. The clearest example, other than “Limit To Your Love,” is “I Never Learnt To Share.” It’s so simple and yet kind of overwhelmingly heartbreaking.
S: Which actually brings to mind The xx, who have a similar post-dubstep, ’80s R&B, swallowing-the-mic vibe to them.
D: There are so many artists right now doing similar things. It really seems to be a huge wave.
S: How to Dress Well, Darkstar, Wise Blood. Just off the top of my head…
D: Balam Acab. Four Tet’s “Angel Echoes” is very reminiscent too.
S: Even Bon Iver’s “Woods.” That whole aesthetic of human sound—sometimes meaningless—set against a glowing electronic background.
D: I wonder how much further this style can evolve. I worry it’ll become a parody of itself soon.
S: I don’t know—listening to this record, I wonder how anyone could top it.
D: Maybe Blake himself, since he’s shown such diversity so far.
S: He’s young. Very young.
D: Too young. Annoyingly, horribly young.
S: So are a lot of these hypnagogic pop artists.
D: I’ve taken to calling the genre “ghoststep,” since it’s a more haunted version of dubstep.
S: I think it’s going to evolve and then spread like a virus. Even Kanye’s record has some of these same stylistic cues on it. Maybe we’re underestimating the potential of the friction between R&B and machine music?
D: Well, Blake has that hip-hop and R&B influence in his songcraft too. Like those Kelis and Aaliyah samples on “CMYK.” The proliferation of media is resulting in some very intriguing fusion and cross-pollination right now. The machine eating the machine.
S: Granted, a lot of it has been juvenile. Chillwave, for instance, is often just awful.
D: As another example of the cross-breeding, you have witch house, which they say is largely based on DJ Screw’s Chopped and Screwed subgenre.
S: Philip Sherburne wrote a great post about this. You can also read its roots in media artists like Philip Jeck, who makes this wonderfully huge music with old records. Giant, slow washes of sound.
D: Ambient music and sound collages and slowcore all factor in too, for sure. Which yet again makes Blake’s feat all the more impressive. He’s synthesizing so many influences into a coherent, very listenable whole.
S: He’s making an explicit exploration of emotion and machines. Putting the organic and the technological in conversation. Pianos, airtight beats, a very emotive voice. “To Care,” for instance, even sounds like it is skipping at certain points.
D: Add in the fact that this is self-titled. And that lyrically, there are “I”s and “me”s. It’s not just some anonymous voice drifting in the ether.
S: Though he does also play against that. A lot of wordless voices drifting in and out of tracks. The vocoder tracks that recall Kanye or Bon Iver. The glitches and pops in “To Care.”
D: For me, that contrast is most evident on Four Tet’s “Angel Echoes,” where a disembodied voice keeps insisting, “There is love in you” and somehow manages to make it sound both true and alien.
S: My favorite record of the year.
D: It’s an amazing duality.
S: It really is. It ends up being terrible so often that it’s stunning when someone succeeds. There is that underlying dread in Blake’s work that makes it land.
D: It’s also a pretty good encapsulation of our era, where iPhones both connect us and distance us, where we can pretty much all communicate in real time but can’t say much.
S: There is friction between the symbolic and the sensory. We can’t watch or hear each other emote. Even when we can, it’s digitized. We live our lives at lower bit rates these days.
D: This album is the music emo Cylons will one day listen to.
S: Weepy robots with James Blake stickers on their machine guns.
Young Thousands 