If you are as big of a James Blake fan as I am, you have been desperately waiting for new music since his critically-acclaimed Mercury Prize-winning album Overgrown was released back in 2014.
Well, wait no more. James Blake’s third studio album The Colour in Anything was released today, it is already streaming on Spotify, and it is beyond gorgeous.
The Colour in Anything is a 17-track album that includes ‘Modern Soul‘ and ‘Timeless’, James Blake’s previously released singles. Blake attributes a lot of the inspiration for the album coming from American singer-songwriter-rapper Frank Ocean.
And sure, while Blake talked about it recently on BBC Radio 1, and spoke about an 18-track album with one song alone being over 20 minutes in length, that has definitely changed. As the album is short one song, and no track of that length exists.
It is still a pretty monumental achievement though.
A warning though as, to me, The Colour of Anything is an album that seems quite disjointed at first — with songs so disconnected in style, Blake’s melancholy falsetto seemingly even sadder than before, and with music and background sounds that are so distorted sometimes that they scraped down my nerves over and over again. Not in a bad way, though, but in one that made me think. And feel things I may not always be comfortable feeling.
Not an album you can sit back and relax to, that’s for sure, as it is far too disquieting.
Keep listening, though, and you will start to hear how truly beautiful it is. Heart-wrenching, but beautiful.
Listen to James Blake’s The Colour of Anything streaming on Spotify in the widget below to see what I mean.