This dizzyingly romantic album is a beautiful thing to behold.
The first five-star album of 2019! Proof that James Blake is one of the world’s greatest producers, this loved-up fourth record, featuring Andre 3000 and Travis Scott, sees him finally in control as a brilliant songwriter and emotive lyricist
Oh, the weather outside is frightful. And the politics sure got spiteful. But the good news is that the perma-brilliant James Blake has flooded his fourth album – Assume Form – with euphoric sepia soul and loved-up doo-wop.
Blake hasn’t lost his love of percussion, and his gift for melody seems without limit. This is Blake at his most focused, stripped of electronic frills, and down to his emotional underwear.
On his new album Assume Form, Blake abandons that piercing despair — though not his emotional vulnerability — by choosing romance over sorrow.
Assume Form forms a paean both to the specific object of Blake’s affections and the very notion of being in love. And while it feels slightly condensed compared to previous outings, Blake still manages to leave enough room for the beauty in his compositions to shine through like a beacon.
Assume Form closes his first decade with a vulnerable and gracious note. While his general “sad boy” electropop is still the sonic skeleton of the twelve tracks, his message has wizened into a more grateful introspection, resting on the back of what is essentially a collection of blissful love songs.
He has found a confidence to use this palette to express more complex notions of his self, to enrich his life and command his ascension into the popular lexicon.
Assume Form feels like Blake opening out, adding fresh, noticeably brighter colours to his palette. Whether or not a smidge more commerciality turns this album into the kind of hit he was predicted to have at the start of the decade, it is immensely pleasing to witness an artist who seemed to be at a dead end now moving forward.
Assume Form makes the gap between Blake and his listeners even smaller, allowing him to open himself to take the handle on his own narrative. It’s a record of contrasts; of blending the dark with an ever-growing light; of wrestling with the demons that hold us back as human beings and, eventually, hopefully, winning.
Assume Form doesn’t have the instant gratification of his 2013 album, Overgrown – arguably his best – but it gradually pulls you in like a soothing balm. Blake builds sonic worlds that are heavily distorted, jarring and abrasively unnatural, but on this album he’s pared down his more experimental tendencies for a safer, more palatable sound.
Blake uses the creative freedom to his advantage throughout Assume Form, his fourth record and his most diverse.
No longer masked by double exposure, deep blues and greys, Assume Form is Blake coming into focus.
Assume Form, despite the handsome ghost-of-a-smile on the LP sleeve, doesn’t introduce a more colorful palette for Blake.
Sonically, Assume Form might be James Blake's most approachable album to date, but its emotions are anything but simple. These are less “love songs” and more “James Blake’s love songs.”
Though it fits in a trajectory we couldn’t see until it was complete, Assume Form is the only kind of album our most saturnine tastemaker could surprise us with: an ordinary one, conversant with idioms of its day, fixing intelligible emotions on a real-life beloved.
Blake’s art has always thrived on dislocation, on bridging tension and consonance ... It sometimes gets abandoned on Assume Form, which, to its detriment, sometimes assumes cohesion as an end to form, rather than tension as a pathway to feeling.
Despite being bookended by a few awkward detours, Assume Form contains James Blake's best writing and production since the earlier part of this decade.
At times, the changes feel experimental and uneven, but when they connect, the shifting perspectives of Assume Form are refreshing.
Blake’s ability to both appease and innovate makes for an always transfixing, if occasionally frustrating, album experience.
It’s an inconsistent album, indicating an artist who was once at the vanguard of a new sound becoming just one voice among many others like it. No longer the singer-songwriter of the future, he’s now simply a modern writer of songs. Thankfully, as shown in glimpses here, he’s still pretty good at it.
Assume Form is surely a shift toward a more optimistic Blake, but occasionally at the cost of song quality and his expected moments of spicy originality. It's a good, sometimes excellent, yet quite uneven record.
Despite the best of intentions, the majority of Assume Form does indeed congeal, becoming a half-cooked, overwrought mess when it has seemingly everything going for it.
On Assume Form, he’s tried to seal up the leaks and make everything solid, but he doesn’t have all the right pieces.
There’s a suffocating seriousness that runs through the singer and producer’s fourth album, one that bogs down genuine moments of levity and love.
It’s a well-curated, 48-minute album of frequently annoying pop that’s just self-serious enough so you know you’re listening to someone who used to be weird.
An early 2019 AOTY candidate.
This album is a culmination of Blake's many years of hard work and it finally pays off in his most beautiful project yet.
I haven't felt this fuzzy inside since Father John Misty's "I Love You Honeybear"
This record makes me so mad. There's part of this that sound so amazing but other times you just get this super boring vocals with a generic trap beat and I just ask myself "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT???".
Edit: After giving this more listens, I can say that I've realized how uninteresting this actually is. It's a boring album with some interesting elements of production but it has some horrible moments too. The generic trap beats and the lifeless vocals just turn this into something that ... read more
Good God this thing is absolutely stunning!!
Blake's vocal range is insane as always and blends seamlessly with top teir production and songwriting to make and epic and dreamy collection of ballads about love, heartbreak and just life in general.
The features on this thing are incredible as well. Travis Scott sounds better to me on this album then he did on pretty much all of Astroworld and that's saying a lot because he sounded really really good on Astroworld.
Metro Boomin absolutely kicks ... read more
This album signals a significant departure from Blake's prominently abstract, idiosyncratic electronic approach to Pop, Soul and R&B that defined his early work. Here he shifts into a more accessible trap flavoured aesthetic as he teams up with the likes of Travis Scott and Metro Booming.
As a huge fan of his earlier work, I find this quite conflicting as for instance on this album it allows him to stay more focused on a specific sound and tone. His album before this: 'The Colour In ... read more
1 | Assume Form 4:49 | 80 |
2 | Mile High 3:13 feat. Travis Scott, Metro Boomin | 83 |
3 | Tell Them 3:28 feat. Moses Sumney, Metro Boomin | 83 |
4 | Into the Red 4:17 | 83 |
5 | Barefoot in the Park 3:31 feat. ROSALÍA | 90 |
6 | Can't Believe the Way We Flow 4:27 | 85 |
7 | Are You In Love? 3:17 | 79 |
8 | Where's the Catch? 4:36 feat. André 3000 | 89 |
9 | I'll Come Too 3:42 | 85 |
10 | Power On 4:06 | 79 |
11 | Don't Miss It 4:59 | 81 |
12 | Lullaby for My Insomniac 3:43 | 76 |
#4 | / | Les Inrocks |
#5 | / | USA Today |
#6 | / | Double J |
#7 | / | Gaffa (Denmark) |
#7 | / | Obscure Sound |
#8 | / | OOR |
#8 | / | The Independent |
#10 | / | Associated Press |
#10 | / | NOW Magazine |
#10 | / | TIME |