James Blake live review
“Next big thing?” asks James Blake, reading the backdrop behind him advertising the series of gigs in which he’s the main attraction. “No pressure then,” he adds with a grin. But his smile suggests he knows tonight might be the one night when the pressure’s off – although the venue is full, the crowd are rapt, and rapturous, and so well-welcomed is he on stage that one suspects he could slather The Birdie Song with his trademark autotune and still send the audience home happy.
Of course, he does nothing of the sort, although what he does produce is just as astonishing. For most of 2010, Blake made a name for himself constructing classically composed electronica, weaving super-addictive fabrics out of Aaliyah samples and intimate recordings of an upright piano, all sliced and diced with the precision of a sushi chef. Tonight, the techniques of those experiments remain, but are now applied to Blake the soul singer, and the consequence is utterly spellbinding. With quiet confidence, enormous musical subtlety and impressive technical skill, Blake spends forty minutes filtering songs that in normal circumstances would sit comfortably between Randy Newman and Bon Iver though throbbing sub-bass and sinewy vocal distortions, creating a soundworld that is rich, textured and expressive in the most abnormal but organic of ways.
His first vocal draws gasps from the crowd – that voice should not come from that head – and the contradictions don’t end there. Modern singer-songwriter R’n’B shouldn’t sound like this; deep reverberating electronica shouldn’t be this moving; someone dressed like a physics student, with bashful stage presence and little in the way of chat, shouldn’t be this charismatic. Then, when Blake reaches into Joni Mitchell’s songbook for a cover of Case of You, he wrongfoots everyone, deconstructing the rhythm of the original and rebuilding it with a rubato and spaciousness that makes it more a genuine reimagining rather than straight homage.
But in essence, this is a still singer-songwriter gig – someone at a piano playing songs – but with the tricks of one genre applied to another in a way that no one seems to have thought of before. Accordingly, Blake’s songs are littered with beautifully pregnant pauses, a device that not only allows the tracks to breathe but also accentuates the hit of the bass and the decay of reverberating vocals. He builds songs layer over layer, mutating them as he goes, until they wash together, intense and melancholic.
“Always listen to music alone, with the lights out, before you read reviews,” Blake insists after a particularly adoring round of audience heckles, in response to the reaction his music is gathering from both within and outside the walls of the venue. It’s wise advice, and Blake’s is perfect late-night lights-out headphone music. But to only enjoy it like that would be to miss live performances like this: his ability to extract and twist the essence of beautiful songs so magically, and perform so technically with such soul, is a rare delight.
