James Blake – James Blake
The most eagerly anticipated album of the last few years for me, having followed James Blake for the past year and witnessed how he has began to incorporate his own vocals into his productions I have been extremely interested in seeing out it would transpire as a long player after the initial beautiful teasers of the Feist cover ‘Limit to Your Love’ and his own ‘Wilhelms Scream’.
Blake is a classically trained pianist, this is a predominant feature in the album however there is not many classically trained pianists who juxtapose that sound with urban glitchy bass music shown in the opening track the piano rides against a dubstep beat before an off kilter clicking percussion joins us along with Blake’s own scintillating R&B vocals. The following track is the unspeakably beautiful Whilhelms Scream, this track when listened through headphones almost feels as if Blake is singing it to you personally. The optimum listening experience for this album for me is to listen via headphones, somewhere urban and at night time – Watch the street lights glisten and the cars go by with people leading their lives around you as you listen to the heart wrenching piano notes play over the urban sounding bass with the heavily effect laden soulful vocals. If it’s not an emotive experience then you have no emotions!
The biggest compliment I can pay James Blake with this album is that at parts it holds an intensity akin to The XX’s debut album and harbours percussion of a similar context. I read a piece which cited ‘Give My Month’ as the low point of the album. The review this statement came from was otherwise glowing and something I’d agree with, but I am a big fan of the simplicity of the aforementioned track just Blake’s voice and piano. I can imagine it would be a nice moment seeing that particular piece performed live just Blake and his audience.
The whole album is simply fantastic. Rumour has it Ladbrokes have stopped taking bets on whether this will win the album of 2011 for this blog!
Highlight: Wilhelms Scream
9/10
Chase & Status – No More Idols
For those who know all about Chase and Status this album does pretty much what they are famed for. It’s a high octane ride through the more commercial Radio 1-esque branch of dubstep, drum n bass and hip hop. I was fortunate enough to catch them performing live at Bestival last year a performance that included some tunes from this album, particularly the opening gambit “No Problem” which forges tribal drums, an African vocal and some old school Prodigy style riffs to create a really solid drum n bass track, sadly one of the few high points on the album.
The album features a wide array of big hitters in the UK music scene, but fails to really get going for me. It may be a sign of my tastes changing but the album just fails to move me, failing to reach the highs of More Than A lot. At the very least I expected a fair few anthems on the album but aside from the three singles that have already been released (End Credits, Let You Go and Blind Faith) and the quite euphoric 'Time' it flatters to deceive. I’d go as far as to say some of the guest appearances are pointless White Lies and Tempa T notably, the latter needs to eradicate the word hype from his vocabulary and come up with some new lyrics.
Magnetic Man appear to have stepped the big dance act game up a few levels with their long player last year and for me Chase and Status have fallen behind, when it looked as if they were due to cement themselves as the big players in live dance music for the next decade.
Highlight: End Credits feat. Plan B
4/10
Talib Kweli – Gutter Rainbows
Upon finding out Talib Kweli had gone back to his roots for his new album I was excited to hear what he would come up with after the experiment with the more commercial Eardrum. He was on form last year with Hi-Tek in their Reflection Eternal project, an album which was close to making it into my top 10 of the year.
The album on a whole is a bit meh, there are some good moments such as the collaboration with Jean Grae in which she begins the track in similar vein as to Timbaland on Aaliyah’s ‘Try Again’ added the usual high quality lyrical flow of Kweli which is here in abundance, as you would expect from his own album. But aside from some nice beats I was left feeling underwhelmed. The album seems to be missing the urban poetry that was found on ‘The Beautiful Struggle’. All in all this album is not bad, but it’s not particularly good either making writing a lengthy review almost an impossible task so I will stop here. If you like Talib give it a spin but don’t expect it to start any ghetto movements. If you don’t like Talib you won’t like this... and if you don’t know who Talib is, get ‘The Beautiful Struggle’ it’s much better!
Highlight – Uh Oh feat. Jean Grae
6/10
The Streets – Computers and Blues
Lets start with the good news; this album is currently being streamed for free on The Streets
Soundcloud page. Now for the bad news; it’s a bit average.
I head back into the realms of mediocrity for this review. Again the album isn’t particularly bad, one doubts that ‘not bad’ was what Mike Skinner has been striving to achieve but aside from a few moments that is pretty much all he has achieved since 2001 and the release of the monumental ‘Original Pirate Material’. The brilliance of that album has been a millstone around his neck as he has been unable to replicate anything of that quality certainly in LP form anyway.
The first track speaks of agoraphobia and paranoia through years of excess with quite an unstructured vocal that fits in well with the subject matter of a person suffering mental frailty. The highlight of the album for me comes for me with ‘Roof of Your Car’ which is quite a happy electronic track with a female vocal sample the subject matter of the track sees Skinner reminisce about a happier time with a loved one. The blues aspect of the album can really be found in ‘We Can Never Be Friends’ a guitar laden ballad about a love lost.
With Computer and Blues as a whole I can’t help think that I’ve heard the narrative before on the previous four albums. However there are some particularly good solid tracks, especially the more up-tempo positive ones.
Highlight: Roof of Your Car
6/10
