Blake enlisted a number of co-conspirators in this effort, including Connan Mockasin and Rick Rubin, and their respective influences can be felt across many of the album’s tracks. Even as he warps his vocals and throws them through multiple effects (his trademark vocoder and AutoTune make triumphant returns after being absent on Overgrown), they remain centered in the mix, and lend the tracks a unity that makes the album feel more like a coherent journey through different landscapes.Īnd while the vocals may be noteworthy, the production is the marquee attraction here. Production-wise, it’s notable how present his voice is throughout this album. “Always” has Blake dueting with sporadic samples of himself against an instrumental that’s equal parts Radiohead and Nils Frahm. This is particularly true of “Two Men Down,” which takes Connan Mockasin’s guitar licks and rappels with them into the ether. Songs like “Two Men Down” and “Always” warp James’ voice in weird and unexpected ways, lending the tracks an otherworldly quality. Sonically, Anything is Blake’s most experimental record yet (and that’s saying something considering that his first album came to redefine experimental pop music). In short, The Colour in Anything is the sound of Blake emerging from his cocoon and grasping at the sounds and sights that the world has to offer. Blake’s notoriously insular music has become grander and more introspective, his soft paeons now resounding choruses and powerful pleas. Using this technique to near-perfect effect (Kanye and Beyoncé were clearly influences on his A&R team), Blake’s third album arrived surprisingly yesterday (midday if you’re in the US and at midnight in the UK) and defies almost everything we knew about Blake as an artist and as a personality. His self-induced “radio silence” made everything he did, a cover here and a retweet there, earthshattering.
Despite being in and around the production of almost every great album of this year, he’d managed to stay resoundingly silent about his own work. And integral to many of these releases has been reviewer favorite James Blake, whose pen and piano has found itself in the works of Beyoncé, Drake, and Kanye West.
The fight for album of the year is bound to be more exciting and worthwhile than this year’s American presidential election, and with more likeable and undeniably brilliant characters to boot. Even artists whose artistic integrity and staying power were not in question like David Bowie pushed themselves to make intensely powerful and experimental records. Frank Ocean, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Anohni, and more were poised to release noteworthy albums, and so far none of the major releases this year have been bad. This year has always been destined to be a barn burner.
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