Stealth-released two weeks after his pivotal guest spot on Beyoncé’s Lemonade, The Colour in Anything finds James Blake consolidating an international reputation as digital music’s premier little boy lost. More soulful, perhaps, than its predecessors, but overlong at 17 tracks, it expands Blake’s bleak vision. Standout love songs like FOREVER dial it back to just voice and piano, while the mesmerising Meet You in the Maze, a digitally processed, revelatory a cappella (“Music can’t be everything”) takes the opposite approach. The influences of Frank Ocean and Rick Rubin and the presence of Bon Iver are all ghostly, while the occasional hardening of beats (Choose Me, I Hope My Life) brings Blake in from the fog.
