James Blake has spent the more recent chapters of his career navigating worlds alien to our own. 2023’s Playing Robots Into Heaven was definitively alien; a remanifesting of Blake’s background in electronic music, running on a disembodied vocal style that has become as much a trademark as his gentlemanly baritone that lifts into sweet falsetto.
If Trying Times overlooks anything that suggests fantasy, that’d be the dystopia that the real world has returned to. Blake’s seventh album strikes a balance; he, alongside his co-producers, continues to manipulate on occasion – weird vocal fragments and steely-yet-aloof guitars being the sublime basis of Make Something Up – but simultaneously, a sense of traditionalism evokes the real world.
He is no longer navigating an alien world, but our current geopolitical crisis, the dark and hopeful light. Darkness begins to take over on Death of Love, its sample of Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker recontextualising imminent end, its choir vocal manipulated to where darker is now even darker. This is pop, but pop is seldom so uneasy.
I Luv U – one of Dizzee Rascal’s best, most theatrical early songs – is sampled on Days Go By, providing the sort of discomfort that such a decapitated head of a soundbite could amidst scorching string additions and garage rhythms. The words “I love you” present no love but stray ambushes of horror, like calm jump scares.
Blake continues to use hip hop as a basis for darkness on Doesn’t Just Happen, its warping, blocky instrumentation later drowned by warning sirens and a foreboding guest verse from Dave. Its vibrato-laden, programmed riff lurks like the next move of the uncaring.
Shaking himself by the collar, Blake employs a sense of duty. He understands he is not the only person navigating this world, treating any willing passenger to an experience that is at least helpful or enlightening when it isn’t spiritual. His soulful hollers cleanse sinful surroundings on the title track, like a church sermon that promises nonstop conviction, in which Blake is left sweating holy water.
Gospel is the album’s secret genre, and despite the modernity Blake approaches it with, he favours the genuine possibility of spiritual healing over religion for the sake of artistic license. Before arriving at quiet church jams Through the High Wire and Feel It Again, he uses psychedelia for imagery; the house instrumentals of Rest of Your Life that beam with magical keyboard arpeggios; a euphoric transitionary sequence.
But when a light is found, it shines not towards gospel but traditional forms of pop music that suggest we start again, pick ourselves up, rebuild the world. On Didn’t Come to Argue, Monica Martin’s shy happiness emerges like a lovely throwback in modern Hell. Even if she herself becomes alien in the song’s second part (“everybody give it up, get it next time”), she delivers some of the record’s most glimmering melodies.
I Had a Dream She Took My Hand samples Joey Quinones and Thee Sinseers’ It Was Only a Dream; where the romanticised aspects of life – the pretty doo-wop – return to the forefront. The reanimated joy of the ‘50s without the scummier bits.
And even if Blake does hack these old-timey sounds to pieces, they still groove with Trying Times’ traditionalism. The human aspect of James Blake’s music has returned and resulted in his best album since his 2011 debut.
The album is Blake’s first since going independent, gratifying a potential casting-aside of the expectations of being James Blake in the 2020s. He made Trying Times on his own terms, grown his freedom beard, and there’s no doubt that that alone could result in an album far more soulfully human.
Best tracks – I Had a Dream She Took My Hand – Make Something Up – Doesn’t Just Happen – Rest of Your Life.
Rating – 8 out of 10
