Reviews
Rolling Stone (p.75) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Blake uses neosoul keyboards, blip beats and layered snips of his heart-starved warbling to create eerie, softly roiling slow-jams." Spin (p.75) - "Using lo-fi digital techniques to play up rough edges and raw emotion, Blake's rare talent is to make music so naked seem unshakable." Uncut (p.98) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "Blake takes from dubstep an awareness of space and silence; he appreciates the power of a perfectly weighted pause." Uncut (p.33) - Ranked #21 in Uncut's '50 Best Albums Of 2011' -- "Blake's debut album revealed him to be an innovative singer-songwriter....Spare, beat-strewn and strikingly plaintive." Magnet (p.37) - Ranked #20 in Magnet's '20 Best Albums Of 2011' -- "His itchy productions were born with an innate sense of agitated drama, the tension that lies the shadows of a pregnant pause or fermata rest." The Wire (p.46) - "Blake is an instrumentalist, digital synthesist, producer and engineer too, and -- most crucially of all -- blurs the boundaries between these roles." CMJ - "[Blake] reaches unplumbed emotional depths using the mostly untapped potential of electronics to reach the soul." Q (Magazine) (p.113) - 4 stars out of 5 -- ""Blake has an uncanny ear for what to leave out, and how absence can play on the imagination." Paste (magazine) - "With a stripped-down, uncluttered sound, Blake's creations are hauntingly beautiful. His voice echoes soulfully throughout..." Clash (Magazine) - "His are fragile, beautiful songs floating over warmly alien, sometimes seemingly formless musical structures yet it's an effort borne through unconventional levels of space and patience."
