James Blake- The Wilhelm Scream

After a series of EPs, James Blake’s self-titled full-length officially dropped this week. Blake is known his two seemingly distinct musical personalities- a dubstep producer (exemplified in CMYK) and a well-trained singer (exemplified in his cover of Feist’s Limit to Your Love). This album displays these two working together with great results.

Blake is part of the emerging deconstruction trend in music (deconstruction is also an emerging trend in rap but that’s a little different) that focuses on portraying feelings and emotions rather than explicit ideas. Other acts in this arc include Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti who work with a 1970’s pop/rock/disco sort of sound, How to Dress Well who produces lo-fi 90s-sounding R&B, Destroyer who focuses on late70s-early80s singer-songwriters, and DJ Nate who picks apart hip-hip tracks to make jumbled-sounding dance beats. It’s really cool how these artists are able to take music that seems to be closely tied to a certain era and break it down into universal feelings and emotions.

A Wilhelm Scream, the track linked here, while not era-specific, is still deconstructionist in that it breaks down an often overlooked element of media into an emotion. A wilhelm scream is the canned scream heard in older movies let out usually right before they die. It’s often from a minor character and it’s an expression of pure desperation and helplessness. Blake expresses this through both the lyrics and production. As the song progresses the noise and haze gets thicker and thicker and more and more covers his voice, the lyrics are becoming literal as he falls and turns. This all stops completely for him to express the finally verse almost a capella before it ends. It’s an absolutely brilliant and universal song and highly recommended.