A Map With No Ocean

Limit to Your Love by James Blake is gloriously strange. It's a cover of the excellent Feist song, The Limit to Your Love, but only about a third of the original is revisited. Hypnotically repetitive lyrics are delivered via an intimately recorded vocal performance. Soft piano riffs feel stolen from a smokey 2 AM cocktail lounge. It's beautiful, understated, and melancholy. Then, almost a full minute in, a wobble bass line drops that can vibrate CDs off my shelves.

James Blake released Limit to Your Love as a single for his self-titled debut studio album in 2010. The full album, "James Blake" was released in the UK and US on Blake's label, ATLAS, with promo and distribution support from the venerable A&M Records in February 2011. It received widespread critical acclaim.

Blake pushes speaker and home construction techniques to theoretical limits with Limit to Your Love. Sufficient amplification and wooferage can make this a truly suffocating experience, but Limit remains quietly affecting.

When this beat drops, dance floors do not fill. This is not a banger. It's more of a panic-attack-er. The lyrics are depressing, and the repetition makes it worse. An ongoing low-register assault provides sinister undertones. The vocal styling gets weirder and more complex as the song progresses, gaining heavy effects, broken-robot reverb, and eventually coming in syncopated rounds. It's an alienating experience.

In the back half, Limit To Your Love drops out completely, leaving silence for a full twelve measures (about 8 seconds). It seems over but comes back at full steam for two more minutes. This is the point where I realize James Blake is messing with me. He may be crooning in anguish, but this is a tightly controlled, considered production.

A slowly building buffet of ear candy rewards those willing to see this experimental and dissonant production through–a nuanced vocal performance, soulful piano, abyssal bass, and crispy sparkling percussion that gets sprinkled about the sound stage. It's a beautiful, unique, unsettling, and powerful track that will find the limits of your amplification.

Data

Song: Limit To Your Love
Album: James Blake
Artist: James Blake
Genre: Electronic
Year: 2011
Length: 4:37
Composer: Chilly Gonzales, Leslie Feist

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-Wade