There's a trend in the music industry to immediately revere anything that seems remotely challenging and beyond the norm - brickbats are reserved for those who might think that something that seems outwardly subversive is, well, boring.
It happened recently with the Knife's Shaking the Habitual, which despite anyone's protests to the contrary, is just something we refuse to believe anyone would listen to for pleasure. James Blake's self-titled debut album mercifully managed to avoid that category, and despite the worry that his Hegarty-eque warbling might wear us down, Overgrown manages to sidestep that too.
The title track and it's immediate follow-up I Am Sold set the tone for the album - it's ethereal, it's fragile, it's utterly beguiling. Lead single Retrograde is a handle for Blake's oeuvre: delicate melodies over loops and samples, production and vocal never competing but complementary. It's hard to think of an artist that negotiates airy and cloistered so successfully.
Blake in the past has been labelled dub/pop-step, but it's an insulting way to describe Overgrown. A song like Voyeur is rich with texture, To the Last similarly arresting in a way not entirely dissimilar to Hegarty. Of course, at time the drones can be overwrought and taxing, but this isn't intended to be light listening - instead, a yearning love letter to profundity.