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 soul. 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.
Because "soul" doesn't accurately describe what is going on in this penetrating, obsessively detailed, consistently bewitching record. Familiar sonic building blocks – voice, beats and keys – undergo a serious filleting and some radical chromatic shifts at Blake's hand. The album's second single, "The Wilhelm Scream", is almost churchy with organ and Blake's sweet, tumbling voice is treated, but still raw. Beyond them, though, there are beats like sonar and irruptions of rustle that build and ebb. "I'm falling, falling, falling," croons Blake, in restrained contrast to the histrionic cinema soundtrack scream, to which the song title refers.
Those who have done some homework will know that Blake was previously feted as a dubstep DJ and producer, one whose handful of singles and EPs always pushed towards ever more cinematic readings of this stark party music. But rather than batter listeners with bass, as he used to do in his DJ sets, Blake has chosen to stun with silence on what is, in essence, a piano-and-voice record for the 21st century. "To Care (Like You)" is a perfect example of what beauty can be achieved when the producerly tricks of one genre are applied to a radically different one.
Like its most obvious referents, the xx's album and Burial's Untrue, this is a small-hours record, one that deploys both hyper-saturated processing and the barest human sounds; one that pares everything to its essence and then dares to cut again. At the furthest reach of this tactic is "Lindisfarne I", a distorted a cappella tune that leaves so much radio silence between the lines that you actually begin to shift in your seat. By contrast, "I Never Learnt to Share" is a haunting lament that gradually builds to a banging, fist-in-the-air climax in which mosquitoes seemingly take over a dancefloor.
A record like this doesn't come without some controversy. There are those who are wary of Blake seemingly repackaging dubstep for the dinner-party circuit. If it's true that Blake's angelic looks haven't exactly hindered his passage overground, this is an album more likely to curdle cream than sit nicely on the coffee table. Blake grew up playing piano; his return to that instrument after a few years blowing holes in his eardrums is an inspired lateral shimmy.
