Captured Thought: James Blake's Album

First off, I’m going to have to get this off my chest: I was extremely skeptical of James Blake going into this review. There’s a huge amount of hype surrounding this album because of the attention his EPs (The Bells Sketch, CMYK, Klavierwerke) received in 2010. I am glad to say he meets the hype.

As a music listener, it’s important for me to have a vast collection that can fit any mood. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I lack albums that I can listen to when I’m depressed or just need some quiet time to think. Enter James Blake. If you’ve ever wanted to just escape your life and take some time to figure out your problems, turn on this album.

Ironically, the best thing Blake uses to invigorate his sound is dead air. Almost every track contains a pause for effect which makes Blake truly unique. For instance on the track “Lindesfarne I”, the whole song is solely Blake’s auto-tuned voice. You did just read auto-tune, but this is one of those rare instances where auto-tune is used well (for a bad example, see Bon Iver’s parts on Kanye West’s last album…). Combined with Blake’s passionate, gospel-like vocals, silence truly is golden on this album. There’s never a spot on the album that feels empty despite it quiet emphasis.

Another thing that James Blake does exceedingly well is the use of loop machines. I’m fairly sure he made the whole album by himself, so this instrument allowed him to take his voice, and along with some pitch tweaks, create the allusion of an entire choir. Any aspiring artists out there who don’t have backing bands should really learn something form James Blake. The closing track on the album “Measurements” takes full advantage of the loop machine. With only a bass synth supporting, the James Blake choir takes center stage on one of the album’s best and most moving tracks.

The only things that bothers me about James Blake is that when first described to me, some one said he was dubstep. While there are a lot of dubstep influences and instances (“Limit to Your Love”, “I Never Learnt to Share”), James Blake should NOT be billed as a dubstep artist. I think he should be given the Primus treatment and given his own genre. The second thing about this album is that it borders on boring at times. It never crosses the line, but there’s a stretch of three songs after the Feist cover “Limit to Your Love” that don’t build off of the momentum brought on by the first half of the album.

All in all, James Blake is surely a contender for album of the year despite it’s early release. Think of it like Vampire Weekend’s Contra or Beach House’s Teen Dream: even though it came out in the first 3 months of 2011, give it some respect. James Blake is a truly unique artist that will for sure have a huge year. Tickets have sold out in minutes (like the Chicago date… don’t worry I have mine!), and rightfully so. This guy is the real deal and I expect great things in the future.

An Inconvenient Truth: Radio is Dead

Nothing annoys me more than when people claim that radio is dead. We've heard it for years. Television will kill radio. The Internet will kill radio. Satellite Radio will kill radio. But all these years later, AM/FM radio is still alive and doing quite well, thank you.

As a station manager of the radio station here at South, I take all these comments personally. Imagine if you loved playing football and people said, "Don't bother going in to football, it'll be gone in 10 years." See how aggravating that can be? People don't realize that radio is actually much better off than you'd think.

People try to claim that television is the radio killer. That's funny because television is quickly being replaced by OnDemand, Hulu, and Netflix. There is no replacement to having a radio in your car because TV in the car is ridiculous. There's also the topic of satellite radio replacing the traditional AM/FM options. However, not everyone want to pay for something they don't use a whole lot. Having satellite radio in the car is like a traditional AM/FM, but you have to pay for it and some of the channels are way too specific (Death Metal?).

So the next time someone says radio is dead. Look them dead in the eye and say, "You're wrong, friend."

Blogging Around!

I decided to post on Rayn's entry because I agreed with her.

Rayn,
This post is really neat. I enjoy surfing YouTube as well. It's a great opportunity for us to both be enriched by the videos people share, but also grow as a class while we bond over interesting explorations of the humanities.
If I had to pick my favorite, it would have to be the video we watched with the graffiti artist and his eye-sight only computer programs. It was so inspiring!
Thanks for an interesting post.

The next post I commented on was Stephanie's blog entry about Formspring. I go on that website occasionally, so I thought I'd share my thoughts.

I kind of agree in a sense that Formspring is the main offender of people using Internet anonymity to hurt someone. In my experiences with Formspring, people have asked really hurtful questions and half the time just use the submission box to post something mean.
I think it is a good idea in principle, but really can't be trusted to today's youth. Kids are too immature and abuse the technology we have. It does promote the idea of being open with people, but you can do that in person.

Best of Week: My TED Speech

The hands down best part of my week was getting my TED speech done. I'd been stressing out about it for a while, so when I was finally up there and performing it, my stress levels plummeted. I worked pretty darn hard to tune up my speech because my paper wasn't the best it could have been. After all that preparation, I feel like I really knocked it out of the park.

I don't feel like I'm being cocky by saying my speech was well-delivered. I think it's more of a confidence thing. Cocky would be to say I'm definitely getting an A on it. I honestly don't care about my grade because I think people actually got to learn something from my speech about copyrights and why we need to change the laws. This speech and my Rilke mashup are part of my push to muscle through 4th quarter and fight off senioritis, so my success today is a long run victory.

Another part I enjoy about being done with my speech is that I can enjoy everyone else's speech so much more now because I'm done. I won't have to get stressed out or worried that mine isn't that good because I not only completed my speech, but it was a job well done.

I feel like the picture I put at the top because I am able to notice the small, yet wondrous things in the world because of my recent alleviation of stress. Huzzah!