James Blake
Playing Robots Into Heaven
REPUBLIC
After a season or so of playing nice with name-above-the-title collaborators (Frank Ocean, Beyoncé) and cozying up to his own brand of cotton-cool ambient R&B (2021’s Friends That Break Your Heart), analog-electronic atmosphere ace James Blake returns to the creepy, glitchy instrumentalism and blip-breezy softcore dubstep that got him here in the first place on his sixth record, Playing Robots Into Heaven.
Though touching on many of the air-based elements that made his 2011 self-titled debut a winning proposition, the throbbing melancholia and more peaceful still-life soul bits of Robots can also be traced to Blake’s recent experimentations in sleep music (last year’s Wind Down LP with German new-age artist Endel), along with the cut-and-paste club-craft made popular by Greg Kurstin’s electro-clucking Geggy Tah. Blake, then, shows equal comfort with low, dozy angularity and the subtones of continental drift on opener “Asking to Break” before lifting the lovely melodicism of “Loading” with doubled, falsetto vocal harmonies and an uneasily put-together lyricism.
The crisply distant balladry that made pop-Blake albums such as Friends and 2013’s Overgrown feel so graceful reappear here courtesy of the slow, incorporeal loop-chop exercise “If You Can Hear Me.” But for every slowdown there’s a buoyant banger on Robots whose dizzy groove and wordy Burroughs-esque edit point provide yet another drama around each bend on tracks such as the askew, pulsating “Tell Me” and the aptly titled “Big Hammer.” Benefitting from both ends of his candles being burnt to the nub, Playing Robots Into Heaven may be the best full collection of everything that Blake can offer when it comes to synthetic soul and restive—and odd—R&B.
