It would be all-too easy to charge him yet again with artistic tomfoolery and arch self-consciousness, there’s a newfound purpose to his dilettantism, one that invests the album with more weight than anyone had any right to expect.
Black Metal, like its predecessor The Redeemer, teems with creepily unaffected longing, resulting in a genuinely gorgeous, beguiling and bewitching album.
Complex, original and even sincere, it’s a brilliant new departure.
Blunt is simultaneously assured and uncomfortable, offering the clearest glimpse yet of his real emotional state while flatly refusing to ever fully commit to it.
Blunt is often called a "prankster" for his confusing and intentionally distracting antics. With Black Metal, he's pulled a fast one on us by delivering something so intimate.
On Black Metal, Blunt's style is still very difficult to classify, yet a hint more inviting and amicable than his last.
This is an often beautiful record that captures a scatty conscience. Sweeping guitars mix with monotone vocals and fleeting folk motifs.
With his latest full-length, it seems he's finally decided to open up, to highlight a love for pop music that's always been somewhere underneath.
Like a convoluted senior thesis that possess a kernel of a great idea surrounded by a great deal more circular logic, Blunt’s Black Metal is essentially enjoyable when taken at face value, but tends to fall apart under closer scrutiny.
Due to the lack of thematic arc compared to The Redeemer, Black Metal falls short of the complete picture that Blunt's indescribable genius can typically paint.
It’s so opaque that it feels as if there’s no way in, as if it’s enveloped in a fug of weed smoke so dense as to obscure what lies at the centre. Concepts of good or bad don’t really apply here: Black Metal simply is.
For all the gently strummed and plucked guitars and bare thudding drums, Blunt certainly lends his own songwriting style, and he continues to apply seemingly helter-skelter track titles.
It feels intentionally obtuse, Blunt’s motivation perhaps bleeding into his lyrics: “Look at me, look at me,” he implores, but that ship has long since sailed for what is surely one of the year’s most frustrating releases.
#1 | / | Crack Magazine |
#1 | / | Tiny Mix Tapes |
#4 | / | Dummy |
#8 | / | Bleep |
#13 | / | Resident Advisor |
#22 | / | The Needle Drop |
#24 | / | FACT Magazine |
#26 | / | The Wire |
#90 | / | Wondering Sound |
#91 | / | Rough Trade |