James Blake recently said in an interview that he has lacked confidence in his vocals up until “the last six months”. It’s a stark admission, and one that would be surprising to anyone that has seen him perform live.
His angelic vocal shapes the mood and changes the dynamic of his bare musical arrangements, intricately looping, layering, wailing, and manipulating them. On his opening night he enchanted the audience at The Opera House with his mastery of the art of tension and release.
Sydney muso Oliver Tank was also impressive in the difficult task of supporting such an accomplished creative and commercial artist. His set was textured, delicate, and intimate, looping-up lush compositions underneath his reverb soaked voice. It was musical Ambien.
Blake began his set at the beginning, showcasing his abilities in production and a creative use of sampling for which he is lesser known with his debut 2009 single “Air & Lack Thereof”. It’s an abstract start to a career which has led to him smashing through the traditional barriers separating indie and mainstream, and creativity and accessibility.
The instrumental track’s harsh beats and sampled chanting, which looped through its duration, blew away many preconceived ideas about his set. As the track rose in intensity with offbeat synths and cymbal crashes it was evident his performance was going to be a little more than tender.
Blake and co. have a strict philosophy of minimalism when making music, but they create more of an atmosphere with their few instrumental voices than most artists do with walls of sound.
Lyrical mantra’s feature heavily in his tunes, such as in his next song “I Never Learnt To Share” in which one line repeats for five minutes, and in the following “Life Round Here”. The song is an ode to his LA based lover, and the struggles of long distance relationships, which variates around the motif “Part time love is the life round here/We never done”.
The way in which the band subtly builds upon their parts as the track progresses and Blake tweaks and layers his vocals makes this repetition rather captivating. The songs move like storms, from sparse beginnings to dense brooding atmospheres, which make emotional investment in Blake’s meditations on love, relationships, and loneliness not particularly difficult.
The ambience of his sound was no doubt helped by the sublime acoustics of Sydney’s Opera House, which made it arguably a more suitable venue for his performance than the open air of festivals. Nowhere was this more noticeable than on the Brian Eno produced “Digital Lion”. His vulnerable voice resonated wistfully before the deep sub bass and crunchy kick drumbeats did their best to shake the venue, as they usually did when things lulled for too long.
Blake has spoken about his desire for Overgrown, his recently released sophomore record, to be more immediate and emotionally piercing, drawing on the influence of Radiohead and hook master Sam Cooke. This is translated to his live show by an impressively dynamic light show. Each song had its own unique display; turning Blake and his band into silhouettes, hiding them behind blaring strobe lights, or flavouring songs with different colour patterns.
“Voyeur”, in the back half of his set, was the stand out of the display, transitioning rapidly from beat-to-beat in combination with the song’s intense, building outro as if it were Blake’s descent into madness. The other highlight of the set, was the stripped down, tender cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case Of You”, leaving the synths behind to play a grand piano for the encore.
