Though it took more than a few listens to deduce whether or not I actually enjoyed the album (to be honest, I’m still not quite certain), it’s hard to deny just how brilliant the record actually sounds. The first non-cover (more on that later) dished up late last year was the haunting The Wilhelm Scream. Despite coating my cochlea with hype-resistant gel, I couldn’t help but be blown away by the track’s sparse immensity. Each crisp, synthesised hand-clap generates a reflexive response like mallet to the kneecap, while every kick resonates with the power of a football to the groin. The vocoder-filtered hook loops incessantly, as is the characteristic of the majority of the tracks on offer. On Wilhelm Scream, it works. On I Never Learnt To Share, an overly simplistic ode to the complexities of the sibling dynamic, it grates enough to make you yearn for the ‘fully-sick’ bass-overload outro.
While his sonic structure possesses a remarkable freshness, Blake still manages to raise a few interesting points on the merits of originality. Limit To Your Love, plain and simple, is a cover – a pretty good one at that. However The Wilhelm Scream wasn’t presented as such. No queries were raised when the track raked in acclaim in the weeks after its release, unlike many tracks that have shouldered claims of being a rip-off. It was Blake himself that revealed in a BBC interview that the track was lifted from the verse of a long-forgotten soft-rock tune (Where To Turn by James Litherland, for those interested). Turns out it’s a tune Blake’s father produced, which, if anything, compounds the Freudian dissections Blake explores throughout his work. Does its unoriginality detract from its quality? That’s some ‘tree in the woods’-level pondering right there. I sure as shit would have never heard the original if it weren’t for Blake’s reimagining. And hey, it’s a killer melody.
As a producer, he displays mastery beyond his years (all 21 of them). As a songwriter, he seems to lack a certain confidence. Though hype set the bar impossibly high, the record stands as a consolidating, if not groundbreaking, debut effort.
