The love love hate hate of Fred Again and James Blake (or Playing Robots Into Heaven reviewed)

Because sometimes reviews should be done quickly

Normally I write one newsletter a week and it comes out on Wednesday (aka NME and Melody Maker release day for those of us who didn’t live in London.)  This week, however, I wrote this James Blake review, intending it for Wednesday. And I figured it was better not to wait, in that the album is released today (Friday). So here you go. Not sure what I will do on Wednesday. Maybe not much. Who knows?

The love love hate hate of Fred Again and James Blake (or Playing Robots Into Heaven reviewed)

Late night, in James Blake’s LA studio. The London studio rat turned super producer sits back in his chair, takes a drink from his organic orange juice and languidly throws a dart, hitting the image of Fred Again that is pinned to his studio door right between the eyes. “That will teach you, Gibson,” Blake mutters. “Get your own damn emo-electronica fan base.” And he returns to his nocturnal work, much relieved.

This, of course, is a total invention. And yet I would love to know what James Blake makes of the Fred Again phenomenon. Surprisingly little has been written of the similarities between the two producers despite the fact that: 1) they come from the same place geographically (London); 2) have similar voices (spindly, mewling things); and 3) occupy a similar place in the musical sphere, where bruised melancholy meets UK club beats, with garage, house and post dubstep clearly an influence on both.

Both artists have also ridden the path from UK underground to global fame, although in the two years between Blake’s fifth studio album, 2021’s Friends That Break Your Heart, and his sixth, Playing Robots Into Heaven, which was released this week, Fred Again has surged ahead in the commercial stakes, becoming a festival headlining phenomenon. On his current tour, Blake is playing one gig at London’s Alexandra Palace, where Fred Again recently played four.

Playing one gig at the Alexandra Palace is not to be sniffed at, of course, and Blake is a very successful artist. Maybe he doesn’t want to get any bigger. And yet he would be excused for feeling slightly annoyed by the way in which Fred Again has stolen some of his thunder, by essentially creating a more commercial and pumped up take on his melancholy club sound.

This is all conjecture, of course. And yet, listening to Playing Robots Into Heaven, I wondered if Fred Again has been in Blake’s thoughts. The album is billed as a return to Blake’s underground roots, specifically the glory days of 2009 and 2010, when he released a series of scorchingly brilliant 12 inches on labels like Hessle, Hemlock and R&S. And, in a way, Playing Robots.. is exactly that, full of warping club beats, sub bass and the kind of sonic bricolage that calls back to Blake’s CMYK EP. The album is not exactly dance friendly - was Blake’s music ever dance friendly, exactly? - but you could get away with playing something like He’s Been Wonderful on a more experimental dance floor. (Indeed, Blake reveals that he has been playing this particular song out for seven years now.) 

Unfortunately, one of the side effects of this is that Blake occasionally ends up sounding a lot like Fred Again (who, in his time, sounded a lot like James Blake). Loading and Tell Me, with their 4/4 garage beats and morose vocals, could fit in a Fred Again stadium set, while Big Hammer, all dubbed out rumble, ragga vocal sample and speaker-bustling menace, is a sonic cousin to Skrillex and Fred Again’s uber-hit Rumble.

Does this matter? Perhaps not. Playing Robots… is my favourite James Blake record in a while. On songs like Big Hammer, the ingeniously warped cut-up soul number He’s Been Wonderful and the throughly gothic Night Sky it feels like Blake is playing to his strengths - production, collage and beats - rather than labouring over the songwriting, which is his Achilles heel. Blake has undoubtedly written some excellent songs, like Rosalía collaboration Barefoot in the Park and Daft Punk favourite Retrograde. But at other times, particularly early in his career, his melodies let him down. I Never Learnt To Share, a 2011 Blake track that was among the first to feature his vocals, falls flat for its laboured, awkward melody and it is telling that the best song (and biggest hit) on Blake’s debut album was his Feist cover, Limit To Your Love. Blake even acknowledges this (kind of), in the notes that accompany Playing Robots Into Heaven on Apple Music. “Writing songs is definitely something I love doing but it doesn’t come naturally to me,” he says. “It’s really rewarding and challenging but not my most natural thing. I think probably my most natural thing is collaging shit together.” 

Playing Robots…, then, is the James Blake album I wanted to hear: fewer vocals, more adventure, weirdness pushed to a tasteful max. Blake is a skilled producer and you can hear his expertise in moments like the vocal on Fire The Editor - detuned to subtle perfection - the ultra-precise touches of reverse on If You Can Hear Me and the satisfyingly jagged central riff of Tell Me, which sounds like Morse Code on fire.

In this way, maybe the appearance of Fred Again - a talented producer without Blake’s flair for experimentation - has helped James, pushing him back into more raucous sounds, while providing a useful point of comparison for the listener. Fred, I would argue, is a producer who doesn’t think enough about his music, preferring instead to release a furious stream of new tracks, EPs and albums, even if it means repeating himself. Did we really need three middling Actual Life albums, using the same found-sound sampling techniques? Or would one excellent Actual Life release have been better? This, perhaps, is what annoys me most Fred Again: he feels like an unusual talent cruising, rather than pushing himself to limits. 

James Blake, on the other hand, thinks too much about his work. And Playing Robots… is his retreat from this. “What I learned was that the feeling of, ‘Is this too easy?’ is actually a good feeling,” Blake explains on Apple Music. “It means you’re onto something, it means you are doing something right.” The result is his most listenable and generally rewarding album in years: it’s the London James Blake of the late 2000s, rather than the LA Blake of the late 2010s, a brilliantly instinctive producer with a wonky eye on the dance floor and a twisted perspective on club trends. And while Playing Robots… probably won’t see James Blake take back the moisten-eyed chart crown of melancholy electronica from Fred Again, it feels like he has reclaimed something far more important: his audacious, spontaneous spirit.