James Blake
James Blake: 'He has made an album more likely to curdle cream than sit nicely on the coffee table.' Photograph: Linda Nylind
It's always a victory when a record is too slippery to fit into a pigeonhole. So it is with 23-year-old James Blake's debut album: 11 heroically understated pieces that skirt the fringes of. The product of a creative family and a popular music course at London's Goldsmiths College, Blake is a mournful singer whose phrasing and delivery betray a youth spent listening to soul and R&B (and, in more recent times, Bon Iver and Antony Hegarty). Certainly, this album's inner heft is the easiest thing to latch on to when the ground starts slipping away beneath your feet. Blake's best-known track, a cover of Feist's "Limit to Your Love", smuggles sub-bass into a weepy piano ballad. Parked mid-album, it serves as a reminder of both how near, and how far, this runner-up in the BBC's influential Sound of 2011 poll operates from the norm.
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