James Blake - The Pulse of Silence

We're nearing the end of the Noughties and James Blake is a kid of barely twenty who likes to drop tunes during the fiery nights at Mass Club or the even more revered FWD in London. The English capital is, as ever, a hotbed of talent, but the shy young man seems to have no interest in brand-new productions. He's young, very young, and getting his peers to move their hips seems to be the only real goal for now. Having finished his popular music studies at Goldsmiths University of London, Blake splits his time between clubs, record shops and his own little room, the ideal place to indulge his first production urges without the weight of anyone's judgment. Freed from the outside world, the small, introverted London DJ slowly begins layering rhythm sections under his own voice. Being the son of James Litherland, guitarist of the legendary Bandit and a solo artist with a delicate but sadly never fully appreciated voice on his only album "4th Estate", turns out to be a small blessing.

Blake seems to want to reshape precisely his father's intimacy and expressive nihilism, building his constructs with a skeletal electronic palette, at times cryptic and piercing. And so it's a scorching-hot voice that bounces around from his very first attempts within his own four walls. The effect is immediately staggering. Blake blends rhythms close to the newborn Dubstep sound with deeply soul-inflected vocal moods. On first impact, it sounds like an unlikely cross between Antony Hegarty and the most isolationist William Bevan. The space between the individual notes on his keyboard takes on a formidable weight. There's a small cosmic void that Blake reaches for in every one of his small compositions. Silence becomes the essential element he aims for again and again, while the pauses between one breath and the next stretch out and the words shyly begin to overlap one another.

2009 arrives, and friends XX create one of the most delicate and introverted debuts on the independent "pop" scene. Blake follows the making of the record step by step, and is so struck by the intrinsic weightlessness of Jamie Smith's samples that he completely scraps his own early sketches, suddenly veering toward an unexpected rhythmic essentialism. Thus the Dubstep backdrop becomes merely a mask, while the substance seems to suggest a gentle electronic minimalism, marked by percussive flourishes that are only seemingly lopsided and intriguing piano/beat combinations. Jack Dunning's Hemlock Recordings, aka Untold, is the first label to notice the potential of this young English talent. The first two singles, "Air & Lack Thereof" and "Sparing the Horses", are produced almost instantly - mostly instrumental tracks that reveal what will become the rhythmic backbone of his imminent electro-singer-songwriter transformation. The first of the two, among other things, becomes a fixture in Mount Kimbie's live shows, while veteran disc jockey Gilles Peterson plays them constantly on the BBC airwaves, raving about them every time and inviting Blake himself onto his show. These are the early stages of an artistic career about to explode. From this exact moment on, the young man starts churning out EPs and remixes for all kinds of artists (Mount Kimbie, Untold, Scuba, Blawan) without pause, doing so under his own name or under the moniker Harmonimix.

It's 2010, and the following EP, The Bells Sketch, still bears the marks of a production rawness that nonetheless bodes well for the near future. Blake toys with timbres and vocal overdubs in the Hyperdub vein, honing his touch at the controls track after track. But the young talent also likes exploring new avenues, as shown by his side project with friend Rob McAndrews, aka Airhead, through two tracks released on Brainmath: the futuristic two-step of "Pekombre" and the pseudo-black scratch of "Lock In The Lion". The dress rehearsals continue across the four movements of CMYK, with brief, vaguely wonky moments ("I'll Stay") and minimal beats in a garage vein ("Postpone"). Things only truly take shape with the following EP, Klavierwerke, in which his piano excursions blend beautifully with the rhythm, once again positioned halfway between that thing called future-garage and rawer Dubstep. Meanwhile, the zigzagging stop-and-go of closer "Don't You Think I Do", as well as the rhythmic excursion of "I Only Know (What I Know Now)" alternated with the usual barely-sketched angelic touches, seem to hint at what will soon define his style. It's no coincidence, then, that "Limit to Your Love" arrives almost unexpectedly, a sublime cover of one of Feist's most inspired songs. For the first time Blake unleashes all his vocal warmth, falls into the void and picks himself back up with a bony, cavernous bass line, while the chorus is only hinted at in the middle section. It's a small but major success that opens the main gates of the international circuit for him. The time for a debut is thus finally ripe. The moment has come to risk his own two cents.

So here comes the first, self-titled LP, its aesthetic already dropping the first hints about its content through a slightly blurred snapshot on the cover, capturing James's face as it seems to vibrate on itself, almost as if shaking off the weight of an emotion, a light, trembling pulse carrying both anxiety and excitement at once. An image that perfectly interprets the feelings later turned into music. Blake adds very few ingredients to the recipe right from the start. There's no room for any acceleration. The expressive urgency is dictated by a melodic intimacy that goes straight for the heart. Silence reigns, stillness too. The passing of time takes on absolute centrality. Nothing is diluted. Nothing is needlessly drawn out. It's even hard to draw any real parallels. If we really had to throw out some names, different answers would come up depending on the moment. Arthur Russell, first of all. Just as the vocal timbre sends the mind back to the already-mentioned Antony Hegarty. Yet it's the well-hidden kinship with Dubstep rhythms, placed like ghosts behind the curtain, that gives the music its lifeblood. The oblique tip-tap of a percussive carpet beneath the synthetic piano on "Unluck" and the carefully measured crescendo built on a single repeated verse (lifted from a song by his father, "Where To Turn") on "Wilhelms Scream" immediately make things clear: we're in the presence of a minimal theatricality, mixed with a hidden inclination toward gentle melodic constructs that are nonetheless full of spirit. There are no veils to lift or tricks to catch. The first part of "Lindesfarne" slips into shadow, before a sly, loping gait emerges, destined to dissolve into total emptiness. Introspection is helped along by a rhythmic calm that gradually gives way to various oscillations. "Give Me My Month" evokes the most subdued Bill Withers of "+'Justments". With "To Care (Like You)", immaculate pauses dampened by controlled, slowed-down beats squeezed into a bucket of bliss once again set the soul alight; just as the more than dormant gospel invocation of "Measurements" cradles the senses, dissolving almost without disturbing them. James Blake finally and fully reveals the extent of his talent. Appearances at various European festivals follow, along with increasingly frequent TV spots and a sizable crowd of admirers in tow.

Only seven months go by before a new EP arrives, Enough Thunder. Riding high on the blinding glow of his splendid debut, the very young DJ-producer tries to pull six new sonic gems out of his hat, trusting in the compositional grace he'd shown his growing audience on more than one occasion. Coddled a little too much by the ever-benevolent BBC Radio 1, London's rising star doesn't shy away from his first high-profile collaborations. Enter the acclaimed and deserving Bon Iver on the hiccupping and slightly cloying "Fall Creek Boys". Less vibrant, less deep pulses support, right from the start, an overall climate that's on average more restless and dry. Underlining this new harmonic guise is opener "Once We All Agree", in which Blake further lays his emotions bare, letting them settle over a handful of keys and excessively (self-)pitying low restarts. The same goes for closer "Enough Thunder", which wraps up a circle drawn with little conviction. Quite different is the story told by the elusive timbral branching of "We Might Feel Unsound", where a lively rhythmic hive accompanies the shy English electro-writer's gentle vocal melancholy. Meanwhile, the immense "A Case Of You" by her majesty Joni Mitchell is reinterpreted with too much haste and without the slightest personal stamp. So Blake slips into the comfortable role of filler at the record's center, before disorienting ears and soul alike with "rediscovered" mastery in the cyber-tronic coda of "Not Long Now". All in all, Enough Thunder shows, on the whole, several avoidable grey areas and a Blake who's at times subdued. But it's just a minor misstep, an accidental stumble.

2012 is the year of his first pause before a new and brighter restart. Just enough time to gather various singles on the compilation "Hard To Find", and his room/studio once again becomes his production den. Overgrown immediately presents itself as the classic sophomore record from a very young talent, widely praised right from his first release and now expected by everyone to deliver on that promise. It's the acid test for a musician capable of catching the audience off guard with just a few elegant ingredients and of instantly placing himself in the small pantheon of "new things" coming out of the UK. In several parts of the record, the expressive urge to drag the melody into the depths of an at times "evangelical" soul intimacy remains only partially unchanged, while in the background a pared-to-the-bone electronic sound ("I Am A Sold", the Hegarty-esque "DLM") more than once fills the space with a bare, effective synth. Likewise, the rhythm section embraces, albeit lightly, structures typical of Hyperdub-style Dubstep.
Digging deeper into the young English electro-writer's work, we suddenly find (somewhat surprisingly) also new pulses and unexpected synthetic drifts, in some cases close to the 50 Weapons sound (!), as happens for example in the sudden rhythm changes of "Digital Lion" (the fruit of a highly successful, and by both accounts very intense, collaboration with her majesty Eno) and "Voyeur", the two tracks that most clearly outline the coordinates of Blake's new path.

But as already mentioned above, Overgrown manages to properly recapture the electro-soul isolationism of the debut, with Blake singing while settling all too often onto velvety paths, magically backed by a synth caught between enchanting plays of light and sudden shadows, in an interlocking of graceful stop-and-go moments; such is the case with the title track itself or the thrilling melodic ascent of "To The Last", where a vocal plea worthy of the best Jamie Woon takes shape. At the heart of the record lies the album's true gem. The full blossoming of our artist. "Retrograde" dispels every doubt and lifts emotions off the ground, slowly projecting them upward in an epic, passionate crescendo, with the keyboard sounding as if it were played directly by a fallen angel. And it's no coincidence that this marvel is the record's first official single.
What remains is to highlight, tucked away in the shadows, the weightless ballad "Take A Fall For Me", a partially convincing collaboration with Robert Diggs, aka RZA, from which one can glean an unlikely fusion between mainstream hip-hop and the introverted, vaguely Dubstep-tinged gait shown by Blake. Still, this remains the only microscopic "blemish" on an otherwise strikingly pristine canvas, on which James Blake managed to pour out, with his usual reserve, his passions and his drive, in a barely sketched dance of soft soul shades and once again decidedly inspired electronic embroidery. The evolution, then, continues.

Thanks to the magnificent Overgrown, attention toward his music grows exponentially on every front: from David Letterman to the biggest music magazines, not to mention the countless "pampering" he receives from BBC Radio, which invites him back time and again, celebrating his flair as one of the best around. As if that weren't enough, James ends up on Beyoncé's latest album, lending his voice to one of its most moving and disarming tracks, leaving the Houston diva herself "breathless". Further fueling this unstoppable rise is the synergy that developed between 2012 and 2015 with another young star: Frank Ocean. An artistic partnership that helped make the sound and mood of the new album, titled The Colour In Anything, even more rich and distinctive - the third LP from the London electro-writer, surprise-announced by Blake himself over the airwaves of the beloved BBC Radio 1 just hours before its digital release. A surprise announcement only in part, though, since the singles "Timeless" and "Modern Soul" had already given the audience a heads-up about the new album's imminent arrival.

Besides the aforementioned Ocean, present as a precious source of inspiration on tracks like "My Willing Heart" and "Always", Blake also called on the illustrious Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), with whom he had already worked on "Fall Creek Boys" from the 2011 EP "Enough Thunder", giving life to the magnificent "I Need A Forest Fire", one of the album's most exhilarating tracks. The cover artwork, meanwhile, was created by Sir Quentin Blake, the renowned British children's book illustrator. The elegant, pastel-toned style, with Blake's figure stylized in soft half-shadow, underscores a genuine intimacy, closely matching the moods expressed by the musician. Meanwhile, the presence of the ever-seasoned Rick Rubin at the production helm rounds everything off perfectly, giving the record just the right amount of sonic glue between its various harmonic structures.

The Colour In Anything is first and foremost a singer-songwriter album. Seventy-six minutes and seventeen songs through which the composer finally bares his soul completely. The electronic escapes à la "Digital Lion" vanish, giving way to a poetic introspection whose electric sheen wraps around and seduces without ever straying beyond certain boundaries, while new, delicate "rhythmic" touches (take, for instance, the scratch-like metronome in "Love Me In Whatever Way") never overly invade a space rich in third-party elements and micro-arrangements slotted together with the utmost care.

Once again, it's the gospel soul, grafted onto a soul-steeped sense of nostalgia, that lifts the English songwriter's restless yet guarded spirit toward vast, open skies. A penetrating melodic excursion that gently sinks its thin blade through words meant, on more than one occasion, to voice intense moments of self-awareness (⟦Q1⟧). Among the album's tracks, the ghosts of a twenty-seven-year-old chasing inner peace take flight. A young man on the run from the world, lost amid his countless, inseparable digital planes, always ready to feed, as best they can, whatever stirs his mind and heart.

Blake's warm, aching voice sometimes seems to come from the centre of a postmodern cathedral, with keyboards always ready to wrap around the scene, between R&B vocoder ditties (“Choose Me”) and irresistibly celestial openings of a candid, evocative flow (the stratospheric “Radio Silence”).
The nods to the past are decidedly noble. Try listening to “Peace Go With You, Brother (As-Salaam-Alaikum)” by the duo Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson, or the stripped-down, dry Bill Withers of “Liza”, and you'll get an idea, allowing for the distance in time, of the far-off origins of this precious recipe. A formula that Blake sends straight to Mars, giving life to an inimitable post-Dubstep, post-soulstep, post-everything fresco.

Two years on, it's almost pointless to deny a certain collective anxiety surrounding the release of the fourth album. Regardless of the quality shown in the past and the deservedly earned status quo, what fuelled it all was a precise set of contributing factors: all manner of guest features from our man, plus two singles released in 2018 that showed him in flawless form. “If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead” and “Don't Miss It” — two dazzling gems with opposite fates, dropped out of the blue, serving as an all-too-delicious appetiser for an album whose title did nothing but further inflate pre-release expectations, launching them into the exosphere like a weather balloon in search of new wonders: Assume Form.

So, a statement of intent spelled out in no uncertain terms by James Blake. And yet the decision to leave the first of the two aforementioned singles off the record immediately sparked real disappointment, as well as raising suspicions that this declared will to “assume form” was actually anything but clear-cut. In this respect, the album's various collaborations point, in principle, to an approach aimed at shuffling the deck even further. There's the celebrated Travis Scott and the radiant Rosalía, the rising Moses Sumney and the institution that is André 3000. There's trap, flamenco, electro-soul (a twin of Blake's own), and a well-worn rap verse in the Outkast vein. All of it crammed into one bucket and blended, in places rather haphazardly, with even two appearances from American beatmaker Metro Boomin. Hopes of a wholly coherent work thus crumbled almost instantly. And the risk of stumbling into a genuine muddle took shape track after track, hardening in several truly unsuccessful episodes, while dissolving just as readily in the set's most meaningful and inspired moments.
Blake has repeatedly stated what the album's leitmotif actually was: to "finally become reachable, take on material forms, leave my own head and join the world". An embrace, however, that's rather feeble and frequently lacking in bite. And "forms" that are often only half-realised, like doodles scrawled on a page between one absent-minded thought and the next. Inexplicable lines, like the one linking Blake to Travis Scott on “Mile High” — a trap ballad like millions of others scattered across the web. A track that adds nothing and only serves to sound the first alarm, after the far more successful title track, which opens the album with an exquisitely delicate, enchanted piano figure, perfectly in keeping with the irresistible pathos that has always fuelled his songwriting. A sublime vocal performance, too, with strings in the finale steering heart and soul toward an aching bliss. A marvel, unfortunately, blown apart by the track that follows.

Well, it's amid this back-and-forth of candid flashes and extinguished lights, in every sense, that Blake has us swaying, confusing, deceiving — showing on one hand personality and depth, and on the other an unusual superficiality in dispatching matters all too hastily; the embrace with the world originally declared seems almost forced by today's market logic, and mostly half-hearted. That drift, however, doesn't apply to the thoroughly successful “Tell Them”, produced with the ever-present Dominic Maker of friendly duo Mount Kimbie and trusted collaborator Dan Foat, featuring the much-hyped Moses Sumney, who fully establishes himself as one of the most promising songwriters around — in short, one of the few capable of carrying forward, with his own stylistic versatility, the eternal rebirth of soul music applied to machines. A track also blessed with a certain exotic appeal. The same goes, for obviously more Spanish-tinged reasons, for “Barefoot In The Park”, sung alongside Latin art-pop superstar Rosalía, complete with a passionate refrain and gypsy gait.

The sample lifted from the timeless melody of “La Contessa, Incontro” by Roman composer Bruno Nicolai is, by contrast, the album's most successful embrace — the most fitting point of contact with the outside world, in this case with the past. Meanwhile the little choir on “Power On”, brightening and introducing the conflicted moods found in the lyrics, highlights just how de facto pointless the winks toward distant genres like trap and rap really are. The ethereal solitude and sweet melancholy that come through in the subdued, closing “Lullaby for My Insomniac” only confirm that impression further.
Assume Form is a stylistically unstable album, even as it keeps a core identity intact across its whole strange trajectory. An instability that, in the long run, weighs on the final result, set against its noblest and most effective moments.

The EP Before arrives a year later, gathering 4 songs meant to satisfy dancefloor urges that had never really died down, thereby revisiting and paying tribute to his early days as a DJ, but above all "finally having the confidence to put his voice over dance rhythms", as he himself puts it. And indeed the title track sounds like it could have come off a record by his friend Jamie XX. A sticky refrain, four-on-the-floor, and a soul crescendo meant to convey a sense of post-pandemic rebirth, with the video shot during lockdown saying it all. “Do You Ever” is sharper-edged and less immediate, halfway between R&B and Dubstep. While the closing “Summer of Now” brings the London songwriter back to familiar ground: introspection by the bucketload, organ pauses, and a shift toward a filtered, Burial-esque little voice alternating with soft, deep singing. Along with the aforementioned title track, it's certainly the best moment of the set.
Before thus signals a James Blake who is, overall, still on form, even though it remains inexplicable, yet again, that the singles released shortly before — “You're Too Precious” and the moving “Are You Even Real”, the latter among the most beautiful songs Blake has ever written — were left off.

After a string of delays forced by the pandemic, the fifth album finally arrives in autumn 2021: Friends That Break Your Heart. An at times uncertain outing, one inescapably tied to Blake's desire to reach global success, which however clashes with his sometimes elusive, introverted, wandering style. The video for “Say What You Will” makes the point vividly, with Blake himself playing a damned, forgotten musician watching the everyday life of a colleague who made it. So this is a pensive, reserved, thematically cohesive Blake. A man in the grip of an early midlife crisis, with melancholies flowing like a river before spilling into the vast sea of unresolved emotions. That's more or less the mood of the opening “Famous Last Word”, a ballad as concise as it is fleeting.

The lines Blake draws at the piano and the microphone continue along the same hazy paths as Assume Form, varying across the three guest spots scattered along the way: SZA, J.I.D & SwaVay, Monica Martin. Three collaborations in which there resurface attempts to disguise everything under an urban veneer that, in truth, adds little and if anything saps the breath from the living material Blake has at his disposal — as is the case with “Coming Back”, which precedes the three featured tracks mentioned.
His never-hidden love for gospel arrangements, stripped back time and again by a voice that nonetheless remains sublime, as well as a central instrument, resurfaces in the set's most focused — and, fittingly, most private — moments, above all “Funeral”. “I'm So Blessed You're Mine” deserves separate mention, ultimately the best-realised progression here, with an immediate “refrain” — the other being that of the aforementioned single “Say What You Will” — and an underlying delicacy that serves as counterweight, making the whole thing particularly appealing. From there it slips along between one lament and the next, one regret after another, a parade of feelings that culminates in the excellent title track. Friends That Break Your Heart could sound like the first misstep of an always-inspired musician. But there are some moments that transcend that verdict, leaving it somewhere in between. All while waiting for better times.

In 2023, a return to his roots, but a measured one. Or rather, a nostalgic vision inevitably filtered through everything that has happened in the meantime. Yes, because after a string of works that saw James Blake reach out toward the major record industry with guest spots and productions for others, the intimacy of Playing Robots Into Heaven sounds like a moment of sacred emotional retreat, even by his own standards.
True, at first something feels off, as if the whole thing wanted to slip out the back door, avoiding friends, acquaintances and paying audiences alike. But the magic of electronic material also expresses itself in endless shades of grey, in endlessly weighing up one's own steps until finding oneself holding a digital notebook crammed with new ideas that sort themselves out. Playing Robots Into Heaven is thus the unexpected synthesis of Blake's thinking: breakbeat and post-club offcuts mixed with the austere soul-step of his early days, calibrating to the millimetre the balance between vocal elements, grating IDM, and an anaemic human warmth. It's as if the cosmic malaise of “Kid A” were soothed with a brotherly embrace, eased with a kiss and finally exorcised in the booming hollow of a strictly empty dancefloor, far from prying eyes so as not to disturb the ritual's intimacy. But what would once have been conceived with rough fists beneath the arches of Fabric is today processed with a horizontal, symphonic taste for building beds and orchestrating samples, threading brief melodic lines into the open-heart surgery of a hip-hop producer — telling is the opening of “Asking To Break”, in which angelic vocal fragments travel alongside timid piano and keyboard ideas, as if it were cosmic matter from Air reworked by DJ Shadow.
Across eleven tracks and barely three quarters of an hour, the record keeps shifting between grey moorland landscapes and rainy metropolitan nights, building its digital matter around a "soul-tronica" that carries the scent of a universal folklore. Here's “Loading”, enriched by a striking instrumental crescendo, and the gorgeous progressive dance of “Tell Me”, which could have come off Kelela's “Raven” given how oilily dark and velvety it sounds. Then there are the watercolours of “Night Sky”, reconnecting with the conceptual ambient of duo Space Afrika, and the Dubstep bubbling of “Fall Back”, this time borrowed from fellow traveller Burial. References that are perhaps nothing new, but assembled by Blake with a recognisable hand that never slips into bad taste.
Indeed, a little further on, one runs into the block-built construction of “He's Been Wonderful”, which, between gospel choirs and noise interference, speaks the same language of free association as Kanye's “The Life Of Pablo”, a vaguely metaphysical breath that also recurs in the dub and soca deconstructions of the pushed-forward single “Big Hammer”. And then there's love: “I Want You To Know”, with angelic voices dipped in a cybernetic soul dried out by contact with Earth's atmosphere, and “If You Can Hear Me”, a brief piano fragment dedicated to his father figure. Not especially romantic lyrically, but stylistically akin, is also “Fire The Editor”, an introverted moment that opens with an innately sweet music-box figure, but ultimately sets the voice aside to close out its "lyrical" arc with a trembling keyboard line. These are the touches that make the record such a rare, singer-songwriterly listen, even setting aside the absence of a classically understood song form: the shared intent between voice, machine, instrument and digital manipulation creates a dense, inseparable sonic blend.
It's no surprise that the reception was, on the whole, rather lukewarm pretty much everywhere, since hype engines, sooner or later, follow their own natural downward path. The man himself chose to reappear with his most muted and unfathomable work since Klavierwerke and CMYK, once again toning things down in favour of a lower profile, far removed from collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé and Travis Scott. Somewhere deep in his own mind, in fact, James Blake is still the same introverted beatmaker as ever, happy to spend months on end in front of his computer with the same curiosity he had back when he was studying music at Goldsmiths in London. And yet Playing Robots Into Heaven is anything but a self-satisfied or forcedly referential listen: frayed yet compelling, rounded and jagged at once, torn between street-level hip-hop energy and deep soul candour, it sounds thoroughly contemporary but never trendy.

Three years later, Trying Times condenses the moods scattered here and there on social media by one of the alchemists of that strange thing called soul-step. Blake's seventh album is also the first to come out on an independent label, Good Boy — assuming that label still carries much real weight in 2026, given that the LP is in any case distributed by a major.
"It's my favourite album, full stop. I know every artist says that, but I truly believe this is the best work I'm capable of. It's what gets me out of bed in the morning. And I can say that with confidence because I've given it twenty-five years," says the singer-songwriter, introducing thirteen songs written to melodically voice a sprawling unease, embracing some of the most varied slices of Blake's everyday life with a grief that's sometimes choral, elsewhere intimate. Starting with the opening “Walk Out Music”, which essentially picks up the rhythmic jolts of “Unluck” and projects them even higher through epic keyboards and words of resignation.

The following “Death of Love”, a duet with Jameela Jamil, expands this blind, shadowy navigation of Blake's, through a deeply mournful symphony complete with a funereal gospel choir drifting in the background. Meanwhile “I Had a Dream She Took My Hand” opens the door to a sudden light tiptoeing into the recording studio as Blake sings of an unwitting love to be honoured like the band on the Titanic just before the abyss. All of it delivered in a spare, meditative manner.
Blake sings, in fact, like a wounded nightingale, an old-school soul preacher who has lost hope and no longer knows what to do. In this slow descent toward the bottom of the ravine, the title track emerges in its phlegmatic glow. It's a ballad as essential as it is supreme, among the best Blake has ever written in his career. The same goes for the set's other little gem, “Make Something Up”, which once again evokes the best of Bill Withers, with a bewitching crescendo at the close.
Soul offcuts also crop up in “Didn't Come To Argue”, a counterweight to the frisky electronics of “Days Go By”, which instead brings Blake back to the present, in a sort of hyper-ballad that serves to set up the electro-urban moves of the following “Doesn't Just Happen”, between rap inserts and the usual androgynous, Burial-like little voices.

James Blake tends to strip things down in the darkest moments (“Obsession”), and electrifies everything around him when it's time to "have fun" and run wild like an A.G. Cook gripped by yet another quantum-pop delirium (“Rest Your Life”). These are moments of pure decompression, useful for catching one's breath before a new dirge re-emerges in voltaic fade from the front door to tell us just how unwell Blake feels among the people of this age (“Through The High Wire”). In this up-and-down of interrupted feelings and social disillusionment, there was no way “Just A Little Higher” could be missing — yet another ballad, epic enough to let us watch a new possible horizon from a distance, while everyone flees, cities become unrecognisable, and the boy from via Gluck contemplates the world between a weeping piano and a barely-stroked violin.

With Trying Times, Blake finds the right path again, one he'd lost in fits and starts over the past decade amid unfocused releases and turning points that were anything but thrilling. After his first three marvellous albums, the London musician gets the room back in order and produces an album that's certainly not meant to be listened to in one sitting, but which, taken in the right doses, can deliver decidedly intense and, in small part, even moving moments.

Contributions by Damiano Pandolfini (“Playing Robots Into Heaven”)

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