Album of the Week: James Blake – 'Trying Times'
After a decade in Los Angeles, the Mercury Prize winner is back in the UK – and sounding newly liberated
“When you’re putting everything into it yourself, it’s a pressure cooker. So it does drive you insane. And eventually you will hate some songs and feel like you’ve failed on a few. But as long as there’s an emotion there, whether it’s anger or ecstasy, or feeling something, that’s intensity enough to carry it.”
James Blake told me that in 2013, a few weeks after the one-man-production-hub won the Mercury Music Prize for his second album, Overgrown. The then-25-year-old blessed with an oratory’s worth of vocal range was still – quietly, modestly, wryly – on a high. “My album sales went up 2500 per cent in the week after the awards. But I’d only sold about four records,” he added with a smile. At the ceremony at The Roundhouse in North London, such was the unknowability of the six-foot-six songwriter from Enfield that host Lauren Laverne introduced him as James Blunt. He joked that he should have performed ‘Your Beautiful’ as his winner’s song. “I was kicking myself afterwards – there was the perfect to opportunity to sing a song that had actually sold some records.”
Almost 13 years on, as he releases his wonder-inducing seventh album Trying Times, much has changed for Blake, and much hasn’t. He’s spent the biggest part of his subsequent recording career living in Los Angeles but has now, after a decade, returned to the UK. He’s worked with some of the biggest names in music, including Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, SZA, Rosalía, and Kendrick Lamar, his studio skills highly covetable in R&B and hip-hop, but is still probably – visually, certainly, lanky stature notwithstanding – unknown to most.
For most of that time he’s been in a relationship with actor/activist/writer Jameela Jamil, whom he credits with inspo for her “constant and unwavering dedication to quality”, and who contributes here as a co-writer. And he’s still cheerfully creating music in a pressure cooker of his own construction – he spent two-and-half years making Trying Times, during which period he extricated himself from the major label system and set up his own indie, CMYK Records, to self-release his music.
That go-his-own way freedom finds vivid form across these 13 tracks. Whereas previously his writing and production have on occasion been a marvel of precision minimalism, of ascetic electronica – something to admire rather than love – the songcraft and soundscapes on this album are astonishing. Human, soulful, inclusive, wholly embracing.
He enters the ring with the opening ‘Walk Out Music’, a pulsing synthwave anthem of encouragement and resilience: “You’re no good to anyone,” he and his pitchy backing vocals sing, “dead.”
Lead single ‘Death of Love’ contains a “master sample” of Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want It Darker’, and has Blake singing close-mic, voice swooping the octaves. ‘Make Something Up’ is a beautiful, drifting earworm, an acoustic guitar strum swelling alongside a hymnal wash of vocals and a low-rise wall-of-sound production. The exquisite ‘Didn’t Come to Argue’ sounds like a comedown take on a Great American Songbook torch song – then, when Monica Martin joins on vocals, pivots to a Sufjan Stevens psych-pop symphony. After Blake contributed to last year’s The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dave returns the favour with punchy bars on the head-nodding glitch-pop of ‘Doesn’t Just Happen’.
Blake largely recorded much of this album at Peter Gabriel’s Real World near Bath, bucolic studios where, rather than create in the windowless rooms of before, he could let the light in. That feeling of play is there in ‘Rest of Your Life’, a vocal-lite, sun-up rave-up that’s both beseeching and chilled: “What are you doing the rest of your life? Spend it all with me… no pressure, I’m breezy”. And it’s there in the closing ‘Just A Little Higher’, a piano ballad that blooms to the orchestral grandeur of violin, viola, cello and double bass, the wearied ache of his voice right (t)here for us. “Adjust your sights just a little higher,” he sings, another note of encouragement and resilience and caution to bookend the album, “’’cause they’re playing us from a great height.”
Trying times? For James Blake these are, in no small way, achieving times. Bravo, maestro.
