James Blake’s "Radio Silence" Is Warming and Numbing at the Same Time
There is something about James Blake’s chilly, exacting touch with drum hits; they feel like you could run your finger over them. The sharp, hollow knock of “Radio Silence,” the opening track on his surprise new album The Colour In Anything, has so much character that you could lose yourself in it, just counting it off. This is partly what people like Beyoncé (who gave James Blake his own track on Lemonade) and Drake (who reportedly put up a copy of James Blake’s self-titled in the studio when he was making Take Care) see in him; his arrangement of items in space, his voice and the drums and the synths like three primary-color chairs in a white room with no windows.
This clinical precision sometimes gives the extravagant sadness of his voice a distant feel. Many of his songs are built around a repeated mantra, something yearning and brokenhearted, and on “Radio Silence” it is “I can’t believe this, you don’t wanna see me/I’m sorry I don’t know how you feel.” You could easily imagine those words being delivered as a scream, or a sob, or with acrid disdain, but Blake sends them fluttering up into his arrangements, like balloons loosed into a grey sky. It is strange music, emotionally, somehow warming and numbing, comforting and discomfiting. You get the impression of a beautiful alien creature rehearsing human emotions in a mirror. You can feel everything to it or nothing at all.
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