James Blake won’t stop cutting close to the quick. For all its surface beauty and power, The Colour In Anything is a pulsing wound. As confessional as pop records come, it’s a mosaic of mirrors with a thousand unobstructed views of Blake reflecting back.
There’s a neutered horror to the 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. Although there’s evidence 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 a loveless couple – 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. When Blake threatens, “I told you what I’d do / If one day I woke and couldn’t find the colour in anything,” on the exemplary title track, his voice is terrifyingly cold.
Yet despite how much hurt there is on The Colour In Anything, it never wants to inflict it onto the listener. It’s the sound of a man looking for friends and finding them in his audience. It’s an open invitation. Or maybe it’s a plea.
By Joseph Earp
