Jose James : 'Black Magic'
Released: Out Now!
Label: Brownswood Records
What a mess. There is no doubting Jose James has some talent. But, well, he does some job hiding it.
Black Magic, sadly, starts as it means to go on. The first track, 'Code', is played in the most ridiculous time signature I've ever heard, and uses more enjambment than any song ever recorded ever. Jose lists over the weird muffled melody with the same eight note tune loop for five relentlessly awful minutes. It was so bad, I felt anxious.
Things go from awful to weird, to awfully weird to vaguely painful and back to awful in the space of the next five songs. When 'Warrior' started I thought there was something wrong with my speakers -- no such luck.
Black Magic aches with a kind of overwrought musical intelligence -- James tries to do too many things across too many tracks, to the point that eventually Black Magic becomes utterly unlistenable. Each song unfailingly provides moments that jar so starkly that you find yourself staring at the cover thinking "Jose, just chill out". You start to feel like he's trying to prove himself to you, as if he's saying, "I've got all these amazing influences and to evidence that fact I'm going to jam them all into every single song" and it's such a pity.
We should admire his experimental edge, but it's not easy, as they all seem like experiments that have been tried and thoroughly failed before.
There is a morsel of redemption in the shape of penultimate track, 'No Tellin', a stripped back, two minute gem. Only even that is ruined as it followed by a 10 minute "bonus track" that just plain hurts.
The whole album too, centres solely on one thing, the one thing that most soul music ever written centres on. Yep. The bad thing. And it becomes kind of hard to stomach. It'd be okay if James addressed different kinds of sex. You know like sex in a car, or sex in a shed, but he doesn't. It's all that kind of dimmer switches and chocolate covered strawberries sex that only soul singers seem to have, and that frankly, to most people is about as appealing as a gang bang with the staff of the Doncaster branch of New Look (ie...not very appealing at all).
Top marks for effort James. No marks for execution.
Words: Oliver Jones
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