- The heart-on-sleeve singer-songwriter finally melts into the savvy club producer on the best full-length of his career.
- James Blake's new album is not like the other James Blake albums. The first single, "Big Hammer," doesn't even feature the British artist's voice, his signature instrument. Instead, it's a thudding trap beat that samples UK dance music legends Ragga Twins, landing somewhere between dancehall and Hudson Mohawke. It's unexpected, weirdly paced and largely instrumental, hearkening back to Blake's earliest, most mind-bending tunes, the music he released on Hemlock and Hessle Audio. The searing emotion and intimacy of his usual work was replaced by a '90s throwback heist video. It's as if Blake was retreating back into the heaving, unpredictable style of CMYK, where sampled vocals were a cipher for his own emotions and swooning climaxes finished his sentences for him. Playing Robots Into Heaven pitches itself right in the middle, swallowing up Blake's wounded reveries in a tide of dance floor-friendly inspiration. It's the most vital he's sounded in years.
Blake actually sings on most of the tracks here, though usually repetitive hooks—like the woozy and lovesick "I Want You To Know," which interpolates Charlie Wilson's memorable hook from Snoop Dogg's 2003 song "Beautiful." "Tell Me" starts out as a whispered torch song before becoming sidelined by a Joy Orbison-style house beat that gallops from the peripheries like an intrusive thought. It's anchored by a glitchy, stuttering melody, sweet but sandpaper-textured, spat out in a nervous, palpitating cadence. The lyrics are questioning and needy—"tell me" becomes an increasingly desperate demand—while some gorgeous pads add a hint of exquisite sadness. It's the same overwhelming wave of sound as his earliest work, only now arranged as elegantly as a royal tapestry.
Compositional touches like those pads on "Tell Me" are a big reason why Playing Robots Into Heaven feels so urgent. Blake's earliest experiments with pop, like "Limit To Your Love," were about the tension between drums, bass and melody, the juxtaposition between sweet singing and chest-rattling bass. Here everything bursts out at once, an uncontrollable outpouring of feeling.
Album highlight "Loading" is the best example—and one of Blake's best tracks ever—starting out sleepy before a kick drum straightens things out and sends the track into one of Blake's stranger choruses. "Where are my wings? They're still loading," he repeats, as if stuck in purgatory. His singing runs the gamut of his range, pitched up and pitched down, throaty, mixing helium-voiced coos and anguished croaks. It's like listening to someone's tortured internal monologue, thoughts rushing faster than you can keep up with. The music is always playing catch-up, thrilling in its breathlessness. In the past, relationships have held Blake down in both senses of the term, whether singing of his life-affirming relationships on Assume Form or about iffy family dynamics and heartbreak elsewhere. On tracks like "Loading," it sounds like he's lost in the storm, as afraid of his feelings as he is grateful for love.
The more succinct lyrical approach also helps the album, which is infused with a new energy and zeal—the familiar realms of the club rather than mainstream hip-hop and pop music. And when he does have a go at traditional R&B songcraft, he's unusually confident. A track like "Fire The Editor," a lightly acerbic, self-deprecating diatribe that sways with the luxurious float of Rihanna's "Love On The Brain," is effortlessly complex, suave in its duplicity. "He's trying to save me from failure / But I've already failed... And If I see him again / Best believe me / We'll be having words," he says ominously. But you get the feeling he's talking about himself, a smile curling at the corners of his mouth.
"Fire The Editor" brings the album back down to earth after a rollercoaster sequence of club songs, leading into the touching "If You Can Hear Me"—an almost uncomfortably intimate letter to his father—and the title track, which was the genesis for the whole project. "Playing Robots Into Heaven" sounds vaguely religious, with electronics appropriating pipe organ-like tones and playing a solemn melody. It was something of an accident. "It felt ironic to me that this modular synth—that seems to a lot of people like a nerdy hobby that's robotic, that can't truly make beautiful music—is just spitting out this incredible, almost fugal harmony," Blake recently told Mixmag.
But that's just it: with Playing Robots Into Heaven, Blake has found the soul in the machine. It's his. Where previous albums have been weighed down by overlong sequencing or torpid tempos, Blake melts into the music around him, becoming one with the electronics. The strange pitch-shifting and processing, which could sometimes feel arbitrary, is essential to the music's fraught messages, and the often abridged lyrics make his words land with a new kind of power.
Ever since he covered that Feist song and embarked on a career of being a sexy-but-sad alien troubadour—to the point where jokes about his emotional state only drove him into further depression—Blake's career has been presented as permanently at a crossroads, trying to reconcile two impossibly different sides of one person's art. On Playing Robots Into Heaven, everything finally blurs together into a swirling mass of propulsive rhythms, gasping synths and angelic vocal melodies. He's ready for the dance floor, but also able to stop you in your tracks.
This the same dichotomy that made Blake's very first tracks so arresting, the silence and grandeur of a song like "Give A Man A Road." "I think dance music loves themes of love lost as much as it enjoys the party atmosphere... We're partying, but we're also being emotional people at the same time," he said. It sounds almost painfully obvious on paper, but few people understand it—and can translate it—like James Blake.
Tracklist01. Asking To Break
02. Loading
03. Tell Me
04. Fall Back
05. He's Been Wonderful
06. Big Hammer
07. I Want You To Know
08. Night Sky
09. Fire The Editor
10. If You Can Hear Me
11. Playing Robots Into Heaven