Critic-at-Large

I Feel the BPM, I Feel the Music 

underscores’ U 

Obviously I took this job because I have a public humiliation kink, but even I’m embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of underscores, the dubstep-techno-house-hyperpop-punk fusion project of singer-songwriter-producer-mixer-engineer April Gray, except as a feature on oklou’s wintry banger “harvest sky” last year. Well, I’m happy to report that U is an extremely impressive record, largely for just how keen it is to impress us—all the while maintaining its complexity. Gray’s gone and looted all the pop genres long-since thought untouchable and rendered standards of “good” and “bad” taste irrelevant in the face of her tact and skillfulness. I love her handling of song structure: she often moves through the standard verse-chorus-bridge episodes, but explodes them in extended intros, drops, post-choruses, and outros. The music overwhelms its form; it’s exuberant, and as pleasing for us as it is pleased by itself. 

“The Peace” threads a killer double-meaning, Gray not wanting “smoke” with the song’s addressee, just to “keep the peace”—only that The Peace is a brand of cigarettes, and there’s that percussive vocoder ostinato keeping the song on-edge as the two share three smokes through its duration. Lead single “Music” goes silly-dumb (“When I’m with you it feels like music”!!) and then rebuilds itself from the ground up in a sudden break after the second chorus. And “Wish U Well” is the closing stunner: with a little R’n’B lilt in the verses, it builds to a magisterial drop around the three-minute mark in which Gray takes the high ground after a breakup: “I can’t go back to you and I know it // And if I’m being honest with myself I don’t want closure / I want to feel the gravity of losing you”. It’s genuinely moving, both emotionally and physically, though I’m not actually crying—I’m too busy gawking. 

Is it too soon to call album of the year? Of course it is, Jackson. (At time of writing, the new Robyn album hasn’t yet dropped, so Salient readers will have to wait patiently over the mid-term break to hear this critic weigh in.) Not that I like to do any of that clickbait ranking tier list stuff anyways. But the fact that I even posed such a stupid question to myself probably is the highest endorsement I can give this record. I adore it.

Didn’t Come to Argue 

James Blake’s latest album: impressive but a touch underwhelming 

It has been a while since the very very brilliant Mark Fisher recommended James Blake’s second album, Overgrown—“Unsure of itself, caught up in all kinds of impasses, yet intermittently fascinating, Overgrown is one more symptom of the 21st century’s identity crisis,” wrote Fisher in 2013. And there is something about Blake’s style—his fusion of hip-hop, house, and RnB in a dark indietronica wash—that, for me, pauses right at the edge of bad taste. It’s a deeply British, metropolitan, “multicultural” sound that at times gives the impression of a posh London kid doing musical anthropology on the black musos he’s been hanging with. If, as Simon Frith once suggested, when we hear most recorded music we imagine the ideal locus of its production (an opera recording evokes the opera house; a dance recording evokes the club), then Blake’s recordings sometimes evoke for me the top-floor sound-proofed spare room of a precocious young man’s decked-out home studio. 

Let me be serious now when I say that I don’t mean to condemn Blake to his comfortable upbringing or his university music education—I’ve had both myself; and besides that, an artist deserves the basic respect of being considered on the merit of their work, not their biography. Rather, I’m saying that I think that what Fisher was getting at about Blake—this sense of an “identity crisis” that his music embodies—is in a disjunction between fact and feeling; between, in other words, the various genres and musical languages Blake draws from and the singularity of his bringing them into one work. Blake’s is a voice, a bright baritone that frequents its falsetto, that at once soars and lifts with genuine technique and at the same time is grounded by the bassy, earthy pool of electronics that accompanies it, in a moody contrast of opposites that often reads to me as self-consciously “deep”. 

His new album, Trying Times is, like Overgrown, something of a capsule of the indeterminacies and hesitations that populate contemporary life—in love, at work, at home—and inexplicably. I like “Death of Love”, mostly for its Leonard Cohen sample, and then for how it follows in a Cohen-gone-trap kind of procedure, wherein a number of Cohen’s lyrical themes (death, sleep, faith, love, change) are treated with sleek obliqueness. “If we’re on an island all the time / And it’s yours, and it is mine / It’s death”, sings Blake in a particularly gnomic stanza. But he’s already confessed his lyrical gambit a few lines earlier: “It never seemed so hard / To say what you really mean”. There’s Cohen’s sound, treated as sample; there too are Cohen’s lyrical themes, treated in abstraction. Cohen’s fluency becomes Blake’s inarticulacy. 

The album is in fact caught up in feelings of inertia (see “Days Go By”) and longings to be set free (see “I Had a Dream She Took My Hand”) and still it makes more complex the ways that these things overlay each other, the cyclic monotony of working life and the teleological glory of romantic love. Oh, I really quite like the title track, with its refrain in the back-up vocals, “As we go through trying times”, lending real gravity to the more lovey-dovey moments Blake indulges, like “You’re a sight for sore eyes / You’re the life force”. Throughout the album, in fact, Blake comes across as quite straightforwardly romantic, as in the proposal scenery of “Rest of Your Life”—but even that track is bolstered by the fade-in of a 2-step house beat halfway through. If Trying Times were a book of poetry it would be a bore, so we can thank our lucky stars that there’s a musician of Blake’s calibre behind it, tinkering with and deepening the words’ apparent simplicity with his magpie’s eye for musical quirks. 

What I’m trying to stress here is the eclecticism of Blake’s style, an eclecticism which makes its only real misstep, in my view, on the Dave feature “Doesn’t Just Happen”. A spliced cello ostinato combines with a baby voice ad-libbing “Ready? Start!”—already a little naff—but then comes Dave’s verse: “My girlfriend hates me / Deep down, maybe I do too.” Deep! But weirdly, I felt myself half-wishing that the rest of the album solicited such a reaction. I wanted something a little edgier or weirder or even more aesthetically offensive, I guess. But then again, maybe I should have taken at face value the claim Blake makes on track six, a sweet compound time duet with Monica Martin: “I flew, but that was in the past / [...] I didn’t come here / Didn’t come to argue”.