Blake’s unresolved music evokes faith without an object of belief

Evidence

On Overgrown, the post-rave tricks and tics have been further toned down, and the album is at its weakest when it limply flirts with the dancefloor. Piano is still the lead instrument, but the chords hang over a backing that is almost studiedly anonymous — a luxuriantly warm pool of electronics where the rhythm is propelled more by the gently eddying bass rather than the beats. Like James Blake, though, Overgrown repays repeated listening. As with the first album, there is a simultaneous feeling that the tracks are both congested and unfinished, and that incompleteness — the sketchy melodies, the half-hooks, the repeated lines that play like clues to some emotional event never disclosed in the songs themselves — may be why it eventually gets under your skin. Blake has said that, by contrast with his debut, Overgrown sounds like the work of a man who has experienced love. For me, it is as emotionally enigmatic as its predecessor. The oddly indeterminate — irresolute and unresolved — character of Blake’s music gives it the quality of gospel music for those who have lost their faith so completely that they have forgotten they ever had it. What survives is only a quavering longing, without object or context, Blake coming off like an amnesiac holding on to images from a life and a narrative that he cannot recover. This “negative capability” means that Overgrown is like an inversion of the oversaturated high-gloss emotional stridency of chart and reality TV pop, which is always perfectly certain of what it is feeling. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1303

Categorization

• SEED: The gospel-music-for-those-who-lost-faith framing is a sharp critical lens — an essay contrasting Blake and Darkstar’s unresolved longing against reality-TV pop’s manufactured emotional certainty would have legs.
• DEEPTHINKING: The image of indefinite, irresolute music as ‘gospel for those who lost their faith so completely they forgot they had it’ condenses a whole theory of post-secular affect: form outliving its content. Not just a music review point.
• XREF: connects to: James Blake re-naturalizes Kanye’s Auto-Tune melancholy into unfocused disaffection — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 456; Unresolved music can express longing detached from any remembered object of faith — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1303