James Blake – Love What Happened Here

Nothing makes me happy like a new James Blake release. Thank God the past couple of years have been full of them. Love What Happened Here came out earlier last month (listen to the title track here on Soundcloud, I have no idea who frankyboy is), and the fact that I only came across it today because it was reviewed on Pitchfork scares me. New year’s resolution: start following other music sites.

Quick recap of 2011 for James Blake: His awesome self-titled debut ended up hitting most year-end best of lists, but the Enough Thunder EP that came out in October garnered a mixed reception. A lot of people especially disliked his bare, piano-and-voice cover of Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” Personally, I loved every track off the album and the EP which tells me again that I need to stop relying solely on Pitchfork for critical opinions.

Love What Happened Here is a 3-track EP in the vein of his earlier 2010 releases like CMYK and Klavierwerke, and has an overall similar sound as well. The title track especially reminds me of CMYK (this isn’t really surprising: it’s been around online since 2010), with the way Blake changes up the synth sounds every so often and intersperses brief vocal samples throughout. The result doesn’t disappoint, either melodically or rhythmically. Blake couples unorthodox percussion arrangements with synth motifs that blend perfectly together in a way that few artists can deliver.

“At Birth” is a slightly different. A throbbing bassline that exemplifies Blake’s dubstep roots runs through the track, with lonely vocal samples popping up every few bars before fading out. “Curbside,” however, really stands out from the pack. It’s got a big, pounding beat that involves what sounds like a timpani and haunting vocal samples that really make for an uncanny mix. The percussion starts out like a hip-hop beat (emphasized by the “no-no-no” samples that could be Kanye starting off “Stronger”), but the way that the soulful samples fit with the rest of the track make classifying “Curbside” to a genre a difficult task.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but for all the love I’ve got for Skrillex and other heavyweight dubstep artists out there, I do enjoy watching the development of artists like Blake who epitomize this quieter, more detailed strain of dubstep. I think some online communities have even started Skrillex vs. James Blake debates. To make matters worse, Blake even publicly denounced the former type of what he called “fratboy” dubstep (Wikipedia calls it “brostep”) at one point, calling it a “direct misinterpretation of the sound.” Oh no, can this mean… dubstep war???

We plot our top 10 2011 dance music trends | 2011 in review

With its biggest year yet, there was a lot going on in the dance music world in 2011.

When dubstep poster child Skrillex nabs almost as many Grammy nominations as one of the world’s biggest pop stars, that’s saying something. Namely, that 2011 was a big year for dance music. With this club-land achievement as our top trend, our other favorites of the last 12 months count down to it.

10. Steampunk
With its gothic tendencies, wild fashion and wilder parties, the Victorian-inspired sci-fi world of the Chicago Steampunk scene ran away with our imagination this year.

9. Moombahton
Its name sounds like the onomatopoeia of a Martian sneeze, but the burgeoning moombahton genre—pitched-down electro mixed with reggaeton’s midtempo chug—experienced a meteoric rise and is poised to take over in 2012.

8. Looking back
Electronic music is routinely breaking some new sound, but 2011 was also about its roots, be it Chicago’s Trax Records’ 30th birthday, Pete Tong’s 20 years on the radio, or the boys at DJhistory.com honoring DJ originators in The Record Players.

7. Dance bands
Disco rockers LCD Soundsystem may have called it quits, but reunited indie dance originators the Rapture (pictured) and Grammy-nominated Aussie outfit Cut Copy carried the torch with two of the year’s best records.

6. The Mid
Locally, no club traversed the varied trends in dance music better than the Mid. In its first year, the West Town venue managed to welcome trance kingpin Tiësto, dubstep architects Skream and Benga (twice), and even hip-hop godfather Afrika Bambaataa.

5. James Blake
Sure, James Blake was a press darling this year, but the bluesy crooning, masterful piano and rattling sub-bass productions on his self-titled debut and subsequent live sets deserve the hype.

4. Bass music
While many were fashioning dubstep for a rave, producers like Apparat, Jamie xx, SBTRKT and even Thom Yorke (in work with Modeselektor and Burial) lent bass music intense musicality. (For more, see James Blake.)

3. Deep house
Disguised by journalists using fancy titles like gothic house and even underground pop, acts like Art Department, Benoit & Sergio (pictured), Soul Clap, Visionquest and Wolf + Lamb really spent this year blazing a trail for a new generation of deep house producers.

2. Festival season
From deadmau5’s (pictured) mud-crusted Lollapalooza dance party to the three-day rave that was the North Coast Music Festival, dance music ruled 2011’s festival season (and that’s just locally—look to Electric Daisy Carnival or Coachella for more convincing).

1. World domination
Spin and Rolling Stone magazines are just two outlets that crowned dance music as this year’s force to be reckoned with. Replacing hip-hop as the pop music framework of choice, electro’s buzz, dubstep’s bass growl and house music’s infectious thump left no one immune in 2011.

Drake, 'Take Care,' dubstep and feminine energy

Above is a good interview with Canadian sing-rap superstar Drake by Sam Chennault at Google Magnifier*. It gets especially interesting when Drake starts talking about dubstep and feminine energy.

Drake's album "Take Care" is number four on the Billboard 200 chart right now, standing out from other mainstream American R&B/hip-hop with its complete embrace of the London post-dubstep sound — post- separating it from the megafestival electronic/rave crossover dubstep of Skrillex.



Drake prefers the stark dubstep-soul of producers James Blake and The xx. He likes the way they manipulate digitally sampled voices in music — the hallmark of classic dubstep circa 2007, the producer-treated, wailing vocal snippet. Jamie xx does it with gravelly Gil Scott-Heron phrases in the title track on "Take Care," a song I predict will be a huge hit, where Drake teams up with Rihanna and sings a plea that could be paraphrased as "I don't care about your complicated past, life is lonely, be with me, you only live once."



The type of dubstep Drake inserts into his album, what Jamie xx specializes in and Drake's main producer Noah "40" Shebib does capably from time to time, is a collection of moods and feels rather than a specific genre. It's a group of sensibilities we call post-dubstep when massaged into dark R&B/dance pop with heavy low-end frequencies, considered to have feminine energy. Meaning the arrangements in a Blake or Jamie xx song feature beautiful melodic swoops and bold rhythmic restraint, qualities associated with women. It occurs to me that beauty and restraint aren't innate to women, or necessarily across-the-board desirable — but the sound works devilishly well with Drake's sensitive nightclub Lothario persona, and is also business-smart, selling to people who buy Adele records, the British belter who topped sales charts all year.

Basically, Drake has seen a new path to women, through post-dubstep. The cavernous electro-noiR&B of his early albums is not unlike "Take Care" — but those albums now feel like prelude to this, a post-dubstep pop record where he perfects his psychodramatic manipulation, casting shadows with music, then strategically emerging with self-effacing emotional rawness.

As he says in the Google interview, quoting rapper Kendrick Lamar and talking about his own brain-hacking technique:

"Women are the tastemakers for what we make. Women buy records. And I have this fascination with getting into the minds of women, and truly letting them know how I think as a man, and letting them know how I view them as women. That should appeal to men as well."

Skrillex - Scary Monster and Nice Sprites

This is in no way associated with punk, save for the fact that Skrillex, a.k.a, Sonny Moore, was the second singer in the band From First to Last, who were straddling that fine line anyway…

Dubstep is popular. It’s a form of electronic music that’s been around for over 15 years and is only now in its limelight as far as mainstream is concerned. From what I have read and noticed, Americans took what was once a flourishing, down-tempo, dubby/groovy based music and bastardized it into what is now known as, “Brostep.” Brostep, unlike traditional dubstep production styles that emphasize sub-bass content, accentuates the middle register and features "robotic fluctuations and metal-esque aggression" according to Wikipedia. An easier way to understand is to think of Transformers having sex with lots and lots of heavy dropped, WUB WUB WUB WUB, and you’ll have a good picture of what this is like.

Skrillex has become the scene leader and is often the reference point in this type of trendy music. His second EP, Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, is what most people who have never listened to dubstep will probably get first. Brostep is to electronic music as beatdown hardcore is to…well hardcore, or deathcore to death metal, or country music to farting. There really isn’t any merit to this release except for the title track which is rather catchy and harmless. If you had to just pick one current dubstep type song to pretty much sum up the trend, this would be the one. Sampling the excited cry of the girl who became famous for stacking cups on YouTube, Moore ushers in a pretty brutal drop after letting listeners get a bit comfortable at the start of the song. If you ever wanted to just let it rip and show off to your friends, that first drop is nigh impossible to top for those with virgin ears listening to this “music.”

There isn’t any redeeming quality to this release. It is what it is; the proverbial nail in the coffin to what was once a decent sub-genre of electronic music. Despite what has happened, there are still some very good dubstep artists out there like Burial, James Blake, Benga, Milanese and Scuba. Those who like deathcore have now found something else to latch onto, and other acts like Korn have jumped onto the bandwagon, thus releasing their recent dubstep influenced album, The Path of Totality. And from what’s happening currently in the scene, expect the Biebs to be using this on his next release. 2012 is around the corner…