James Blake- “To Care (Like You)”
From his self-titled album

On the EPs leading up to his proper debut, James Blake didn’t sing much. If I had a voice of such eerie and reedy versatility, you wouldn’t ever catch me not singing. But especially on songs like “CMYK,” he preferred to blanket his hypnotic suites of New Jack dubstep with Kelis and Aaliyah samples. As simple as it sounds, the difference between the promise of those earlier works and the assured brilliance of his alluring new album is his voice.

James Blake is the best album of this young year because it takes the time signatures and tropes of dubstep and combines them with Blake’s vocal, stretched and pitched and chopped until it’s sometimes unrecognizable, to create something more vital and capricious than we’ve come to expect from the genre. Burial’s Untrue, the closest precedent to something like this, came close, but it didn’t have the variety of expression that Blake shows here. And, again, part of the reason was that none of the weary samples on that record were Burial’s.

Similarly, Antony and the Johnsons seem to be reaching for the same regretful, old-soul mood as Blake; but, with Antony’s cabaret piano and his high-contrast, vintage album art, he always seems to be fetishizing the past through his music. Blake sounds so much more present to me.

Like the fragmented self-portrait that graces the album’s cover, James Blake reveals a different part of itself with each new listen. I’m sure I’ll be writing about it again later in the year, but I might be saying something completely different about it by then.