It’s not James Blake’s fault that* The Colour in Anything* came out in the middle of a rainy week. Or it might be; the circumstances seem almost planned. Maybe the team plotting the surprise release of this album was watching storm fronts, waiting for ideal new-James-Blake-album conditions. On first impressions alone, they succeeded wildly: When bed sheets are in disarray, when grey light seeps into wet windows, and the sky is an interminable reminder that there is always a chance of showers, his particular brand of impressionistic melancholy is hard to resist. Stay in bed or descend out into the streets, it doesn't matter, his music finds a way to summon personal rain clouds that follow you wherever you go.
In keeping with his last two albums, The Colour in Anything is a hard, frank, and unsparing listen. But if you listen closer, you will notice some tonal shifts in the fog. For one, Blake shed the monomania of his past work, allowing other voices and sounds to creep in. He’s noted in interviews that *The Colour in Anything *is meant to represent a sea-change, personally, musically, and geographically. The disposition of this record is suppose to reflect its milieus: Southern California, friendship, and new love. Seven of its 17 tracks were co-produced by Rick Rubin. Much of the album was also mixed and mastered at Rubin’s Shangri-La studios in Malibu. Frank Ocean and Justin Vernon appear throughout, lending writing and production help. There’s also Connan Mockasin, who appears, bass in hand, for a song. James has stepped out of his London bedroom and invited collaboration at an unprecedented level. Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.
All that said, in the best way possible, in no way shape or form is *The Colour in Anything *a rapid departure or reversal of what Blake does well. He still paints in deep blues and greys. His production is still unparalleled, spacious, and impossibly textured. His voice is still chilly and metallic, but maintains all its choir boy charm. His music is still towering and menacingly sad. He sings almost exclusively about lost love (“While you were away, I started loving you”), miscommunication (“I’m sorry I don’t know how you feel”), miasma (“I hope my life is no sign of the times”), and defeat (“I want it to be over”). It can be brutal to hear the microscopic variations of themes hammered over and over again, making the album’s pace something between apocalyptic and glacial. Each listen is draining in its way, and when it's over it feels like decades have passed. It can be so self-indulgent and extravagantly sad that it comes close to ruin porn. But it’s worth it. And there are positive messages to eke out of the experience, vitally important ones; that it's all right to be hurt, or alone, that heartbreak helps fuel the flow of life.
As contemporary electronic music moves towards more caustic, crunchy, and self-referential tropes, Blake's music is almost resolutely old fashioned. It deploys auto-tune, expressive (bordering on Platonic) percussion, minimalist pianos, and throwback sub-bass warble and womps. He distills his influences of R&B, gospel, and the wide patina of British dance music in such strange and ineffable concoctions that it makes it difficult to not rewind certain chunks of drum breakdowns and airy synths continually. The melancholic funk of “I Hope My Life (1-800 Mix)” or the dive bomb synth swoops of “Radio Silence” show Blake’s ability to orchestrate moments that mimic the stark romantic bombast of a Caspar David Friedrich painting.
Yet ironically Blake’s own grasp of lyric writing is still immature. He is never clever, catchy, or subtle. If anything he can even be comically melodramatic (“Where is my beautiful life?”) or annoyingly whiny (“I can’t believe that you don’t want to see me”). It makes it so that you wish he would just hum and slur his words into indistinct hunks of emotion. There are also several missteps in how his voice is treated throughout the record. A high pitched vocal processing in “My Willing Heart” is nearly unlistenable. Guest Bon Iver's “hooooo” at the start of “I Need a Forest Fire” is laughable in its wimpy approximation of bravado.
But these flubs are all forgivable. For the most part his singing can be vertiginous, isolating, and induce rapture when stretched into vast choruses. And when he’s alone at the piano, turning off the electronics, Blake approaches the sublime. He may never be able to reproduce the discomfiting beauty of his cover of “A Case of You” but he can still yoke tears from dry eyes in vulnerable songs like “F.O.R.E.V.E.R.” or the album’s title track. In closer "Meet You in the Maze," arguably the album's best song, he abandons instruments all together and sings in a multitudinous acapella that washes away the harrowing experience of the last hour in a rush of catharsis. It’s the closest the album comes to an anthem, and it’s heartwarmingly about self-care, discovery, and acceptance. After the probing self-consciousness that preceded it, these five minutes of fragility feel healing. “It's me who makes the peace in me...Music can't be everything," he sings, a moment of pained honesty showing that amidst the grand big-budget drapery of this album, its goals are actually quite modest. At the end of the day Blake just wants to prioritize happiness and self-knowledge above all else. It’s a thoroughly unhip statement that makes you believe smiling, even if it hurts, is the coolest possible thing in the world you can do.
