James Blake’s Overgrown is an outstanding LP with an outside chance of scooping up the Mercury Prize on Wednesday. The record ticks all the Prize criteria: it is perfectly crafted, nuanced, diverse, ambitious and, above all, original. As the shortlists for the Mercury Prize becomes increasingly conservative with every year, the judges would do well to place the 1st place ribbon on Blake’s meticulously ironed minimal button-down shirt for his creative inventiveness alone.
Listening the the record is an intense experience. More expansive and assured than Blake’s self-titled 2011 debut album, Overgrown straddles genres and sounds with a confident maturity that belies his tender age. Blake’s sombre musings meet a skewered R&B melody on ‘Life Around Here’, while ‘DIm’ and ‘Our Love Comes Back’ thrive on a stripped back, tender structure and jaunty piano scales straight out of Art Tatum’s book of improvisation. Elsewhere, thunderclaps battle with a strained synths on ‘Retrograde’, ‘Voyeur’ glitches towards a white noise climax and ‘To the Last’ encapsulates the intimate feeling of the record: “We’re going to the last/ You and I” the Londoner strains over ghostly off-pitch piano chords.
Blake also attracts blockbuster company these days, with Brain Eno collaborating on bass-led ‘Digital Lion’ and Wu Tang Maestro RZA spitting bars on ‘Take A Fall For Me.’ The latter track, with RZA smearing awkward ‘British’ imagery over the thudding waterfall-like beat (he rhymes Fish and Chips with Guinness) seem at odds with the LP’s nuanced aesthetic. But the track is merely a blip as Blake’s production flourishes in a liminal space unconcerned with where it sits in the broader musical landscape: “ignore everybody else,” he croons “we’re alone now.”
Lonely, isolated and tantalisingly intimate, the record invites you into the mind of an estranged lover on a cold, sleepless winter night with only looping thoughts, bleeping chords and icy beats for company. At times subtly repetitive, often cathartic but always adventurous, Overgrown marks Blake’s transformation from a melancholy post-dubstep pin up to esteemed producer capable of winning hearts and minds, as well as Mercury Prizes.
exeposedev 