Listening to “Limit To Your Love,” James Blake’s breakout cover of Feist, you might hear a singer of startling originality, and indeed, Blake, the star of London’s underground dubstep scene, has brought new vision to a genre that often seemed limited to a certain kind of sound. Performing Monday night at Philadelphia’s own Union Transfer, the artist might have been reminded of his own youth performing in clubs that, like UT, were formerly warehouses. This down-and-out aspect of the London dub scene — epitomized by the anonymous and punishing trainlike bass of producers like Burial, and the equally anonymous electronic blips and whirrs of The Joker — seems like a throwback now that Blake, who has inarguably transcended that scene, is incorporating his own beautiful, melodious, and downright harrowing voice into songs that otherwise might not seem too out of place in those old warehouses by the Thames.
This switch happened in 2010, and rocketed Blake to a slight measure of fame — previously, he had best been known for experimental “post-dub” like his EP CMYK, which, while probably interesting, sounds too much like technologic bleeps and whirrs for me. Blake decided to cover Feist’s “Limit To Your Love,” and brought to it, alongside his voice, his training as a classical pianist. For the full first minute of that song, he sings and plays piano, like John Legend might; then, the noise drops out, and “There’s a limit/ to your love,” echoes into stillness. Several seconds pass, during which, on Monday night, people almost began talking.
Then — bam! — a bass drops. And this is nothing like a drop Skrillex could concoct; indeed, the London dubstep scene was known for its incorporation of weird, off-kilter drops, which don’t blast the listener with walls of sound but rumble, subterranean, like trains. This drop is by now legendary — it is likely the moment that made Blake famous. I can only encourage you to listen to it.
And it doesn’t stop there, the bass continuing to drive forward as Blake sings: “There’s a limit/ to your care.” Perhaps care, as opposed to love, is the true basis for relationships. Soon Blake’s voice reemerges into fresh air, the bass drops out, and we’re left blinking in sunlight. Blake’s back to singing about love.
Even “Limit To Your Love” is a dubstep-inspired tune, looping back and forth between two repetitive sections — “Love,” which is airy and heartbroken, and “Care,” which is sinister, angry, and a little depressed. Both emotions find full expression in this gorgeous song, which also was the moment on Monday night where the crowd got its most hyped-up: when Blake stopped singing for the first time, and the lights went off, and someone almost talked, and then, bam! four spotlights shot up like machine guns into the sky.
Sadly, Blake more often applies his considerable talent as a producer and singer to producing neurotic, melodic dubstep that is substantially more influenced by the London dub-scene than are his covers of Feist and Joni Mitchell. That is, he brings the elements of singer-songwriter songs, such as lyrics and his voice, to dubstep, instead of incorporating a dub sensibility into more classic singer-songwriter takes. This has created songs that are insular, circling, and difficult, like much of the music produced by his underground contemporaries; but unlike the music of The Joker or Burial, Blake brings his distinctive voice, and his classical training, so that even when tunes become difficult, they still have a rich, digestible pallet of noises that gives them broad appeal.
Indeed, on Monday night, I occasionally found myself zoning out — and not always in a good way — listening to Blake’s tranced-out cuts from his newest album, Overgrown, which are far richer sonically than those from his self-titled debut. Whereas those songs were sparse, with each sonic element carefully placed so that even the listener had to notice, and think about, its induction, the cuts on Overgrown start often as fully formed melodies — there’s no click/clack as in the beginning of “Unluck,” for example. Blake’s technique on his debut brought necessary attention to the sparseness of the post-dub technique, which incorporates elements of dub along with more technologically inspired computer noises, showing how such a song is made, and why it is necessarily a work of art. Now that Blake is clearly an established artist, Overgrown has expanded into denser territory, with songs often weaving together several sounds at once. Blake assumes that his listener accepts that looping and the conglomeration of noise is a valid way to produce a song; furthermore, his artistic process may have matured to a point that he is more comfortable making songs out of more and more disparate elements simultaneously.
This doesn’t always lead to better songs, though, and the standouts on Monday were still mostly off of his debut: “Limit To Your Love,” of course, but also “Measurements,” with which he closed off the show. For that song, he asked the audience to fall silent, and amazingly, we did while he recorded his voice — live — to be looped back and sung over and over, spiraling into a melody that is plaintively haunting and beautiful — “Limit” without the dark underbelly.
“Life Round Here,” a cut off Overgrown, was substantial, with Blake and his two bandmates — old friends, he said — concocting rhythm from a medley of snare taps, cymbals, crunching noises, and the repeating phrases, “And we’re at square one/ And we wait too long.” Blake’s voice, always listenable, also found countenance on “To The Last,” which slips from an aching love song to a recollection of love lost, Blake singing, “If only” over and over again. If the effect of these songs is rather melancholic, it’s supposed to be: this is music that, as much as it moves rhythmically, moves around an idea, never fully gathering force to launch a melodic assault — except, that is, when Blake covers other singers.
However, the great benefit of Blake’s nearly obsessive devotion to this spinning, roundabout form of production inherited from his youth is that his development as an artist is on display. Blake does not advance in leaps and bounds; rather, his process is incremental and methodical, always incorporating new sounds to make tracks that are always doing something different than his old ones.
Blake is, above all else, an artist, not a performer, and his demeanor on Monday showed that — swaggering out in tailored sweatpants, Blake hardly got up from his synthesizer all night. It makes sense that, given his vocal talent, he would want to incorporate more singing into his nighttime-inspired music, but I hope that, as he does, he will remain as interesting and even divisive a figure as he is now. Whether he produces more hits as immediately accessible as “Limit To Your Love” is an open question. But if he does, there’s no doubt that those songs will be his.
