Kevin Bronson on April 18th, 2013

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By Julia Betley

“I don’t want to be a star, but a stone on the shore” James Blake sang as he opened his performance at KCRW’s Berkeley Street Sessions with the title track of his sophomore release “Overgrown.” It didn’t take long at intimate showcase at Bob Clearmountain’s Apogee Studio in Santa Monica for Blake to warm the crowd.

Having just played a sunset set at Coachella the day before, Blake joked that the dust storm that descended upon the Indio crowd “descended upon his throat.” But there were no signs of residual effects; Blake’s recognizably decadent voice easily carried throughout the studio, accompanied only by a drummer with a stripped-down set-up and another player who switched between piano, guitar, and synth.

Twice Blake began tunes by looping his own voice – once on “I Never Learnt to Share” where he overdubbed himself three times, layering complex melodies on top of one another to create a beautiful dissonance, and once more to end his set with “Overgrown’s” first single, “Retrograde,” for which he hummed the hauntingly beautiful melody into the microphone and looped it throughout.  “We’re alone now, we’re alone now” he echoed over a slow build of intensely layered synths.

While Blake said that he felt his first album was “more basic,” one could argue that he’s taken a more direct approach to the songwriting on “Overgrown.” On his self-titled debut album on Polydor, Blake played around with multiple sounds and effects, creating musical vignettes – almost like sonic sketches. But the songs on “Overgrown” each have a solid arc to them, even though, as he told KCRW music director Jason Bentley in an interview between sets, his approach to songwriting hadn’t changed much. He still starts almost every song at the piano, either by playing it or sampling it.

What Blake does so masterfully throughout “Overgrown” is use synths as both a melodic and percussive instrument, transitioning flawlessly between the two. He creates percussive sounds all over spectrum and weaves them in and out of intense, brooding synth melodies, which he exemplified throughout his set, especially during “Voyeur” and “Our Love Comes Back.” Even when he tried to start “To The Last” and missed turning a knob on his synth to the right setting – twice – the crowd simply adored him.  All was quickly forgotten when he sang sweetly “We’re going to the last, you and I.”

Blake’s set was recorded for use on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” on Wednesday, April 24. [updated]

||| Live: Blake plays Sunday in the Mojave Tent at Coachella.

Photo by Larry Hirshowitz