James Blake - Playing Robots into Heaven Album Review

James Blake evades easy categorization at every turn. He burst onto the scene in the early 2010s with a series of forward-thinking electronic EPs that made him a name in the EDM community. He gradually shifted toward melancholic singer-songwriter work, then became an acclaimed producer, and now works as an amalgam of the three. Blake's career trajectory is storied and strange, flirting with mainstream success but never quite reaching it. He's produced for the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, Jay-Z and Rosalía, and yet he's rarely mentioned in the same breath. Just this year, Blake featured on Metro Boomin’s Across the Spiderverse soundtrack, and contributed to Travis Scott's Utopia, which debuted atop the Billboard 200 chart. With Blake’s latest release, instead of capitalizing on these high-profile appearances with a radio-ready project, he’s ditching mainstream aspirations, releasing his most varied and uncompromising album yet.

Playing Robots Into Heaven is aptly-titled, wringing spiritual, celestial emotion from cybernetic soundscapes and robotic vocals. It’s at once angelic and automated, like an escalator to heaven. Synthetic sounds run the risk of distancing the listener from the artist, obscuring their emotions in a digital haze, offering only fleeting moments of striking illumination. On this album, Blake uses obscurity to his advantage, offering minimal lyrics like a guiding lantern through the digital fog. “Loading,” the album’s second single, distills this style into a delicate self-duet, framing Blake’s falsetto in a cycling beat resembling a loading bar stuck at 99%. By letting sonics do the heavy lifting, Blake captures complex feelings of heartbreak, mania, and loneliness that would be flattened into cliché by traditional approaches. Ironically, Playing Robots Into Heaven’s layered, conflicted soundscapes challenge a binary approach to emotion, reflecting a humanity that can’t be found in 1s and 0s.

However, not every experiment pans out. Where “Loading” feels complete and satisfying, instrumental tracks like “He’s Been Wonderful,” “Big Hammer,” and “Night Sky” are too enamored with their foundational ideas to develop them adequately. “Big Hammer” was a bold lead single, with a chopped-up, frenetic Ragga Twins sample slightly outpacing a rave-ready beat. But, before the track can boil over, Blake turns off the stove, and the track never quite reaches the cacophonous peak implied by its progression. “Night Sky,” from its distorted vocals, rejection of structure, and abrupt switch-ups, reads like an instrumental B-side from JPEGMafia’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs (AMHAC). Unlike AMHAC, however, it’s not confrontational or visceral enough to justify the lack of progression. The greatest sin of Playing Robots Into Heaven is a reluctance to take its ideas to their logical conclusion.

The instrumental track that fully reaches its potential is the album’s titular track. “Playing Robots Into Heaven” closes the album with an emotional gunshot, one cocked and loaded by the preceding two tracks: “Fire The Editor,” an impassioned screed against self-censorship, and “If You Can Hear Me,” perhaps Blake’s most hopeless, desolate track till date. This leg of the tracklist embraces direct vocals, like a desperate confessional cutting through the noise. “If You Can Hear Me” is about looking up and realizing you’ve drifted hundreds of yards away from the people you love. You have been pulled into a riptide and dragged out to sea, setting the stage for the final track. “Playing Robots Into Heaven” reincorporates a recurring noise from throughout the album, that of a faint sonar pulse calling from afar. Adrift in a vast, silent ocean, you desperately search for that signal, and for a moment, you hear it. You swim toward the sound, but just as quickly as the pulse appears, it flickers and fades away. There’s no answer, and there’s no way back to shore. It’s a harrowing, deeply resigned, and ultimately truthful way to end an album about absence.

James Blake’s talent has always been apparent. At his best, he combines his myriad skills to evoke an emotion with such precision and power that it can almost be overwhelming. On Playing Robots Into Heaven, he achieves this effect in small pockets, but more often than not fails to take ideas to their limit. Blake has many solid albums, but lacks an artistically defining project that holistically illustrates his abilities. By jumping from sound to sound, Blake often finds himself at ground zero. If he wants to reach new heights, he needs a pre-existing foundation to build upon. Playing Robots Into Heaven makes progress in this regard, revitalizing sounds from Blake’s EDM past; however, it continues to prioritize reinvention over the realization of his potential. For James Blake to make true progress, he must value depth over breadth, hone in on the sounds that come most naturally, and regard categorization as a guide, not a curse.

---

This review was originally written and published for Tastemakers Magazine