Recess discusses James Blake's Overgrown

Arts editor Katie Zaborsky and Music editor Dan Fishman sat down in front of an audio recorder Wednesday to record Recess’ first podcast of the year: a music review of James Blake’s new album, Overgrown. Below is the transcript of the first couple minutes of the conversation.

Dan: James Blake’s been on the scene in the music world since 2011 where he hit it big with his first full-length album, the self-titled James Blake. Blake is a London musician, he’s sort of working within electronic music, and he’s also doing soul music. He’s working with dubstep, and he also has these minimalist classical techniques. And he’s like a lot of modern figures today—a very genre-bending figure, and he’s gotten a lot of success recently as an indie hit, a Pitchfork kind of icon and figure. But he’s also doing things that I think a lot of artists aren’t doing today, especially with the use of piano alongside dubstep and soul.

Katie: Yeah, I agree. I think that James Blake first entered the cultural consciousness—more so than just for people who already listen to electronica and dubstep—when Beyonce actually listed “The Wilhelm Scream,” which is on his album James Blake, as one of her favorite songs of 2011. And on that album as well, there’s a cover of the Feist song “Limit to Your Love” which also earned him a lot of attention…he took that song and just completely transformed it only through his voice and piano, and so you already see he has a base level of talent that he’s working with, without even the dubstep influences and electronica that he’s doing. So I think that you really hear that in this album as well.

Dan: Yeah, I think for me, what makes James Blake James Blake is not just his genre-bending soul and hip-hop and dubstep, because you have folks like Abel Tesfaye of The Weeknd doing that kind of stuff and you have Frank Ocean working with R&B and hip-hop, so there’s a lot of genre-bending going on. It’s kind of like the quintessential alternative way to go about creating new types of music is to do fusion. Blake’s doing fusion, and I think he’s doing it in a very interesting and unique way, but for me, [what makes James Blake James Blake is] how he’s using spareness in his music. Most of his music, or a lot of it, is just empty space, and it’s something that you see in classical music, especially modern classical music, but it’s not something that you see often in pop music, which is very rushed, very much like a club music scene. So Blake, at least when he does his full-length album, is doing what a lot of electronic artists aren’t doing.

Katie: Yeah, I think there’s this temptation in the electronica genre where you have every sound at your fingertips, you can incorporate every sound, so I think that it takes some restraint to know when you have this spareness and what that can do to your listener as well, as opposed to these really intense moments of saturation, these sounds that are layered on top of each other and to be contrasted with maybe just one sound, maybe even no sound. So I think he’s really a master at that, which you can’t say about a lot of artists, I don’t think.

Dan: I think also among electronic musicians, he’s an album-maker. I think there’s a tendency in electronic music in general to make a song that will go for ten minutes that people can dance to, or that can be played in a club, and that captures your attention, but doesn’t necessarily function in an album context. I think what Blake does is he subdues that sort of Kanye-like instinct to make this very loud, very enthusiastic music. [Blake] sets the register at a much lower level and lets the listener tilt their head in a little bit to understand what Blake’s trying to do and that opens up a lot of room for stuff that people aren’t doing today.

Katie: So I think now is a good time to segue into particular songs on the album. And I was just going to ask Dan, what do you think is the standout track for you? When you replay this album for yourself—we’ve played it for ourselves many times—do you find yourself going back to a particular song for any particular reason?

For the rest of the conversation, tune in after 5:38 on the embedded podcast, which is included here in full.