Featured Album

Think of your favourite love song. Chances are it sounds nothing like Assume Form (Republic Records). The fourth record from British electro iconoclast James Blake features a dozen haunting tracks of jittery samples, minor-key piano melodies and falsetto melodies straying off-key. Whitney Houston this is not. But there’s something tender and honest about Blake’s fragmented form of love. Just one song after he croons a trippy doo-wop ode to effortless romance (“Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”), he’s wondering aloud whether his beau (The Good Place actor Jameela Jamil) loves him back; it feels too good to be true. While Blake has never been coy about his emotions, contented infatuation seems like foreign territory for a songwriter who usually piles on an extra serving of gloom—Blake is the guy Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar call to lend their work an angsty edge. That makes ...