Playing Robots Into Heaven – James Blake

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2023	Playing Robots Into Heaven	James Blake	★★★½	70	Electronic	Ambient	Trip-Hop

James Blake‘s newest record Playing Robots Into Heaven is a haunting collection of abstract, minimalist dance numbers that are heavy on the electronics and light on vocals. James Blake drifts away from the hip-hop, R&B-heavy production he’s dabbled in over the past seven or eight years and re-introduces some of the more glitchy electronics and piano of his early days. It creates something with a new feel, with glistening notes, quirky twirls, bouncing bass and scattered samples played over these sparse mixes. 

“Asking to Break” is a pretty traditional James Blake piano/singer-songwriter track, and “Fire The Editor” is similar but with more electronics. “Loading,” “Tell Me,” “Fall Back,” and “I Want You To Know” are ambient influenced dance songs that are heavy on drum loops, distant synths and samples. Sandwiched in the middle of the record are two hip-hop influenced songs , “He’s Been Wonderful” and “Big Hammer.” And the record ends with the beautiful ambient title track,  which sounds like a demented carnival ride’s flutes working like a dystopian siren’s call drawing you towards the end of time. 

James Blake has spent the better part of the past decade proving he’s a uniquely talented singer, songwriter and producer for a variety of genres. Overall, this album is cool because you get a nice compilation of the different things Blake has worked on over his career. But you don’t get a smooth blend of it on any individual songs, which makes for a choppy record. 

The mix here is also cold throughout. That’s obviously intentional given the sparse instrumentation on most tracks, but it leaves some of it feeling bare or unwelcoming (which isn’t usually what you’d want in dance music). Part of that is a lot of the songs don’t really feature Blake’s vocals, or if they do his voice is used more as a sample or texture instead of a melodic line. Blake’s voice typically conveys a lot of emotion, and tracks here with more traditional melodies like “Fire The Editor” and “Loading” work as really moving moments. But, without the vocals doing as much heavy lifting throughout, it leaves songs feeling cold and a little hard to grasp, even if some of the drum loops, samples and electronics are really engaging.