![james blake overgrown zip file james blake overgrown zip file](https://youhearthat.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/img_0495.jpg)
![james blake overgrown zip file james blake overgrown zip file](https://www.lamareeandco.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Convivialité-3-scaled.jpg)
“Voyeur” moves from Blake’s now-familiar vocal manipulation into a proper 4/4 banger, which would be club-ready if not for the (comforting) haze of keyboard drone Blake tosses on top of the mix. “Digital Lion”, conspicuously co-produced with Brian Eno, slowly adds layer upon layer of percussion and vocal loops to the song until we’re lift with a wondrous concoction, something like a multi-tiered mammoth proudly resting in the display case of a posh bakery. The B-side run of “Digital Lion” through “Our Love Comes Back” brings Blake’s love for ebb-and-flow dynamics and headphone-fetishist sonic tinkering to his album work in a more full-blooded way than anything on James Blake, showing the singer’s new willingness to push territory previously reserved for his EPs (and their more limited audience) onto his wide releases. On the first few spins, Overgrown seems almost bereft of even the restrained hooks and more pop-oriented elements of James Blake. Commercial in a way none of those initial releases even began to predict, James Blake reinvented its songwriter as a balladeer for the 21st century, someone taking the basic formula at the heart of the music made by progenitors like Joni Mitchell - emotive, confessional songs built around instrument-and-voice in structures that at their best were simple without being predictable - and updating it with futuristic electronic flourishes and enough subtle textural notes to fill a carpet warehouse.īlake’s follow-up, Overgrown, has good news for those fans, at least on its surface. Many of Blake’s early fans, those who listened to tracks like “CMYK” and “Klavierwerke” on headphones and in dark East London clubs, must have felt a bit betrayed by the full-length record that followed. When you realize you can do such a thing, with a keyboard and your voice, there’s only one thing to do next: you do it again, over and over. Married to Blake’s vocals, a perfect blend of concert-hall-ready pitch and gripping emotional cracks, the cover performs a rare miracle of the form: it both becomes his own song while also staying true to the fundamental spirit of Mitchell’s original classic. In what would become the signature move of his self-titled collection of songs, Blake fills the track with an almost equal amount of silence from his piano, letting notes ring and fade out into silence, as if the instrument were tossing and turning in halfsleep for the three-minute take. Performed for a BBC Radio 1 session to coincide with his album’s release, Blake’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” shows the then-21-year-old’s hand - or hands, really, as his flourishes on the solo piano venture sound out his virtuoso talents on the keys. Listeners wondering how London’s James Blake moved from the subtly boundary-pushing dubstep of his first three EPs to the comparably straightforward, R&B-laden singer-songwriter material of 2011’s James Blake, his wildly acclaimed debut LP (and the sold-out international tours that followed), should look to a single song for their answer.