James Blake: The Colour In Anything

For all its surface-level beauty and power, The Colour In Anything is a pulsing wound, as confessional as pop records come. It’s a mosaic of mirrors – a thousand unobstructed views of Blake reflected back.

There’s a kind of neutered horror to this record. Blake sounds like a man who has just realised his suffering has no limit, and ‘Waves Know Shores’ is a leering howl of pain pretending to be a ballad. Though there’s evidence enough to suggest Blake is mourning the end of a relationship – even the title of ‘Put That Away And Talk To Me’ sounds like a command traded between loveless lovers during a spat – it would be reductive to call the album a ‘break-up record’.

It’s more than that. It’s an album about confronting frailty – your own, and the frailty of others. “I told you what I’d do / If one day I woke and couldn’t find the colour in anything,” Blake threatens on the exemplary title track, his voice terrifyingly cold.

Yet despite how much The Colour In Anything is of hurt, it never wants to inflict it. It’s the sound of a man looking for friends and finding them in his listeners. It’s an open invitation. Or maybe it’s a plea.

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