Insincerity at the heart of his art – James Bay, Electric Light, review
James Bay became the biggest selling British debut artist of 2015 with the aura of a singer-songwriter invented by the music business to fill gaps in the market. Here was a strikingly handsome fellow with a sweet, sharp voice whose classic singer-songwriter sound would fit equally onto Radio 1 and 2 playlists. You could imagine marketing meetings positioning him between the acoustic pop of Ed Sheeran and rootsier folk rock of Mumford & Sons.
His debut album, Chaos and the Calm, was packed with sleekly structured songs of romantic yearning, adorned with sparkling guitars and singalong gospel inflections. It was recorded in Nashville with musicians who are old hands at this mix while the intense, youthful drive of Bay helped connect with a young audience. He toured with Taylor Swift and duetted with Justin Bieber. It can’t have hurt that he looked like a male model in a Vogue fantasy of Americana. A perky hat on top of windswept long hair became his trademark. He was rarely seen without it.
Until now. For his second album, the hat has come off and he’s had a trendy haircut to emphasise a new pop modernity. These visual changes signal a major stylistic shift. James Bay Mark II is sexed up, scuzzy and drenched in the digital effects of electronica, hip hop and R’n’B. Electric Light has been produced by Bay himself with super-producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence + The Machine, Coldplay).
Mixes are dense to the point of overload, underpinned by crunchily distorted drum machines and bombarded with chopped and twisted blocks of backing vocals. It sounds as if the 27-year-old is determined to drag his old school oeuvre into the 21st Century. But when you penetrate the startling surface, what you hear is a makeover, not a reinvention.
“I’m fed up with this profile,” Bay declares on In My Head, his sinuous voice bobbing above waves of synths and ghostly swirls of autotuned choirs. “Where are you in this ocean of static?” On song after song, Bay is still searching for romantic commitment even if he’s started using Tinder rather than the Lonely Hearts column of a faded newspaper. Structurally, the songs retain standard Americana formats, with country and gospel trimmings. They are catchy and efficient, at times rising to anthemic emotional heights.
All Bay has really done is exchange one set of generic production clichés for another. The layered vocoder harmonies come courtesy of Bon Iver and Kanye West, the bubbles of treated noise evoke Frank Ocean and James Blake. Bay’s rockier songs channel The Strokes rather than Bon Jovi but still sound secondhand. Somehow, it only serves to emphasise a quality of insincerity at the heart of his art, an obsession with style over substance. If the hat fits, why toss it away with such cavalier disregard?
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