More than a decade after the slow, dark and deep electronic sound now called dubstep began to develop, it finally has something close to a break-out star. James Blake is tall, handsome, young, talented, and unafraid to acknowledge Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell as musical influences. 

This self-titled album almost completely reverses some dance music's tendency towards slick, full-throttle cartoonishness. It's a record which is as slow, meticulous, and emotionally engaged as its first single, the Feist cover 'Limit To Your Love', suggested it would be. 

Blake employs the musical building blocks from which he created that track throughout the album. Stately piano chords ring out and then abruptly stop. Syncopated beats wink into existence, tiptoe about nervously for a while, then disappear. The vocals, which Blake relies on far more than he did in his previous work, are heavily processed and frequently multi-tracked, but despite this, sound plaintive and soulful; a single lyric will typically be repeated again and again, gaining emotional force with each repetition.

Blake's music can be divisive, and one criticism has a grain of truth in it: the carefully composed and arranged nature of his music sometimes detracts from its emotional pull. Some songs of love and loss from the album seem to have been composed by an alien who has never experienced love or loss, but is fascinated by the idea. The unsettling strangeness of these tracks is one of many reasons why the record succeeds.