James Blake has always been a confessional singer-songwriter—consider the days where he sang about siblings who would not speak to him, or the “I can’t believe this, you don’t wanna see me” that opened 2016’s The Colour in Anything. But Assume Form is something else, something like a great unburdening. We are not 30 seconds into the record and he is already peeling off the layers to bare all his innermost thoughts: “Know I may have gone through the motions my whole life,” he sings at us, before we have even gotten a chance to find our footing in this surfeit of feeling that is oh so exquisitely soundtracked by a barely there drumbeat and a delicate piano figure.
Blake’s last album was billed as a kind of coming up for air. After the darkness of his self-titled debut and 2013’s Overgrown, new love had let the light in and buoyed his spirits. That now looks like a merely transitory stage on the path to the grand transformation he has undergone on Assume Form. He is a new man here, changed by love—something we learn again and again, as he examines every centimeter of his ego, every corner of the vertiginous ecstasy and insecurity of true love at last. On that opening title track, he confides, “I will be touchable/I will be reachable,” sounding like he is repeating instructions a couples counselor once gave him. Even goopier is the line “I thought sex was at my pace, but I was wrong.” There’s something weirdly clinical about his treatment of romance; instead of rose petals, there’s the pulpy taste of a wooden tongue depressor.
There are moments of genuine sweetness, like the closing “Lullaby for My Insomniac.” It is a promise to keep his sleepless partner company until the dawn, voiced in airy, multi-tracked vocal harmonies and framed by church organ: “I’ll stay up too/I’d rather see everything/As a blur tomorrow/If you do.” The sentiment is sketched with the fine-tipped economy of a pencil drawing; the arrangement sounds like it might have been written by Arvo Pärt. Musically, as a kind of ambient-chamber-gospel music, it captures the essence of Blake’s songwriting in a way he has never done before. It’s perfect.
There are some jokes, too: In “Tell Them,” a slinky trap number with a co-production from Metro Boomin, he admits, “In the snakepit so long I put posters up”—a delightful image and a keen contrast with the opulent surroundings: Arabesque melodic accents, flamenco handclaps, and a breathy guest verse from a soulful and sandpapery Moses Sumney. And in the heartbroken “Don’t Miss It,” when he sings, “Everything is about me/I am the most important thing” it’s an altogether welcome moment of self-deprecation. Although, here in the penultimate song, some 40 minutes into the most solipsistic album of his career—the word “I” appears in the album’s lyric sheet 136 times—it may be a case of too little too late.