Just three short months after creating this blog, I've finally summoned the wherewithal to start posting stuff in it. On the one hand, this seems to show an embarrassingly transparent lack of commitment on my part. On the other hand, hey, it was summer!
Well at any rate, all that's over. And if you're wondering what it is I was doing all summer instead of putting fingers to keyboard, the (or really, an) answer is: listening to James Blake. Rarely since high school have I been interested in listening to an album so obsessively as his self-titled release from this past winter. And it's not as if an album of sparse, icy electronic music by a young British man is the logical counterpoint to a summer idyll at the Chautauqua Institution (but if you could somehow mix Beethoven and Jimmy Buffett, you'd be right on the money). Yet there I was, sneaking off between bouts with Debussy and Puccini to slap on headphones and bump this incredible set of, dare I say, pieces.
For those of you who have never heard his music, you might just now be questioning my choice of words. I admit that drawing a distinction between a “song” and a “piece” is like arguing over what breed a dog is. No matter what you decide, it'll still wag its tail, get its paws all over your furniture, and lick your hand when you feel sad, and isn't that what dogs are for? Well, I only indulge in this distinction because I think that the absence of anything like a pop song structure (i.e. nothing that functions like a verse or chorus) and the strongly instrumental character common to most of the songs on this album demand a different kind of thinking.
For the uninitiated, Blake's music consists of shards of pop and R&B melodies that serve as a center to and a foil for the primal dance-floor debris of his native dubstep sound, which comprises most of the backing. From what I've heard of his earlier work, vocals and piano have gone from the role of just another sample to being prominently foregrounded. His having arrived at this balance is what makes his music original. The vocals and piano lend a sweetness and humanity to the dubstep, and the intensity of the dubstep gives the vocals a darker, more intense edge. Lyrically, he leans toward a minimal, abstract approach. This amalgamation of styles puts him at an isolated stylistic intersection, one whose novelty mates very well with his artistic concerns.
And what are these concerns? His music is fatalistic in matters of personal relationships, shows them not so much out of control as out of understanding. It's music of the murky subconscious, where fear and desire are wordlessly sublimated, which in turn pushes the conscious mind in directions it doesn't understand, toward and away from people in turn. It shows us a world where words can't capture the same meaning as a look or an inflection; where emotions are mutable, contradictory creatures, liable to scuttle away if you get too close. This is a world of crossroads in which everyone has lived at some point, and for those who are willing to examine it, Blake is willing and able to show it to us.
Above, I've posted the song that strikes me as the best summation of what Blake's music is about: “I Never Learnt to Share”. Interestingly, it's both the album's longest song while having the fewest amount of words. The whole text is comprised of just a single lyric:
“My brother and my sister don't speak to me / but I don't blame them”.
It's a pretty common musical rule of thumb that a song's lyrics need a certain amount of holes in the story they tell and the details they offer, so that the imagination of the listener can fill in the rest. Too much detail can destroy the universality of a song, but too little can leave a listener nothing to identify with. Blake ballsily takes a stand at the extreme shallow end of the lyrical pool, trusting that the paucity of lyrics will play into his approach. And he's right, for two reasons.
One is that this line, by itself, conveys every salient aspect of the story. We can infer that the singer did something to anger his brother and sister (he could also be poetically referring to a lover, e.g. someone who is like a brother and a sister in terms of offering male and female forms of companionship) so deeply that their relationship is permanently altered. It must have been long enough ago that things have permanently settled down (since he says “don't speak” instead of “won't speak”). We don't know why, or under what circumstances, or anything else. But we don't need to know. The cooling of a relationship with someone you're close to is so archetypically human yet so intimately personal that Blake knows that this is all the information listeners need to be able to fill in the blanks and relate personally. It also has a more general resonance; like the singer, we sometimes find ourselves in a situation whose rules are clear, seemingly in contrast to how we got there in the first place.
The other reason is that the emotional ambiguity of the line (i.e. the information it doesn't contain) allows for a number of different specific ways the singer could be feeling. This gives Blake the freedom to let the music constantly redefine the exact meaning of the words. The way in which he does so is what gives the piece its forward momentum and its sense of lived-in personal truth.
Right off the bat, this occurs in microcosm. The line is sung three times with no accompaniment. With each iteration, a voice is added. Simple enough concept, but the game is afoot. The intimacy of the first line immediately commands our attention, as if Blake is somewhere in the next room, singing to himself as washed the dishes. The laying bare, both in the lyrics and in the voice, of such a hurt is arresting. The entrance of the second voice, impossibly identical in timbre, is shocking. It becomes clear that Blake is not in your kitchen; you are in his head. The incredible counterpoint the second voice is weaving around the first voice alters its affect, complicates the original feeling through the introduction of non-bluesy harmonic practices, namely leading tones. By the entrance of the third voice, you have some idea of what to expect. The harmony is filled out in more detail, adding a chilling deceptive cadence on “...speak to me”. Each voice is moving semi-independently, so the end result is a thickly textured harmonic web which sounds as much like a murmuring crowd as like any kind of “normal” polyphony. It's like Blake is showing us how the more he thinks about this idea, the more complicated it gets.
At this point the camera pulls back, in a sense, and we get sonic scenery for the melody. Thrumming, throbbing, windswept arpeggios over pedal points create a sense of motion inside a larger stillness, like standing outside on a January night and watching the endless pattern of falling snow. Narratively, this motion within stillness seems to imply one moving along one's fixed destiny, or guided by forces out of his control. I realize I'm taking some pretty generous liberties here, but this seems like a plausible attitude for the singer to have in order to accept his situation the way the lyric implies he is. Eventually, smoothly, the instrumental texture warms up and transitions into a fuzzed-out keyboard sound. The nostalgic warmth of this sound, accompanied by chords which are finally not tied down by some kind of pedal point, is as if the singer is saying to himself “but we had some good times, though” and cracking open the door to his emotions just a bit. This section terminates in a cadence, the only one (besides the end) that happens in a song that otherwise smoothly segues between its many sections.
The brief moment of repose attained by this cadence point is summarily shattered by the return to the snowy arpeggios. This time they come back armed with a deep, marchlike kick drum thudding away like a migraine. When the vocals come back in, Blake takes us through a three-time repetition and building process similar to the one at the beginning of the song. What's different this time is that as many things are falling apart as are being built up; it feels as if the kick drum is urging this process onward. The first time through, we have the original solo vocal, the keyboard chords, and the drum. As we press on, the melody is joined by a firm, active bass line, then a double time kick drum and more voices. This all has a role in the increasing intensity, but what is more important is what changes under duress. The vocal line's emphasis begins to shift onto increasing repetitions of “but I don't blame them”. At the same time the warm keyboard sound grows increasingly harsh and brittle; as its chords coalesce into a single, laserlike pitch, the piece's climax is attained. The note takes unyielding hold of all registers, and the first clause of lyrics is finally eliminated. We're left with obsession over a note and over a few words. One says “I don't blame them”. The other says “I blame myself”.
Yet somehow, the piano chords return at the end, awkwardly superimposed over the writhing synthesizer line which it had earlier evolved into. Maybe this implies a cycle, a wound that that is by turns old and new, accepted and strained against, peacefully buried and unearthed, still bleeding. Such things are certainly real. But by no means are they always permanent. Maybe someday the singer will make the changes he needs to make, forgive himself, and thus stop the cycle. But that may be a phase of the story best left to another artist.
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