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James Blackshaw

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James Blackshaw, “Unraveling In Your Hands” (Self-Released, 2024)

This album has been a long time coming, as Blackshaw has mostly been on an extended hiatus from performing and recording since 2016, as the eternal instability and financial stresses of life as a musician nudged him towards a life in the food scene instead.  Eventually, however, his creative urges began stirring once more and he announced his return to music in 2019, but his plans took some serious hits from the pandemic, the deaths of a close friend and a beloved dog, and a broken shoulder along the way.  Thankfully, he persevered regardless and Unraveling In Your Hands marks the first new James Blackshaw album since 2015’s Summoning Suns and it is a damn good one too.  In fact, Blackshaw almost makes it seem like no time has passed at all, as these three pieces are as compositionally ambitious, virtuosic, and deliciously compelling as ever.  While the centerpiece here is ostensibly the nearly 27-minute tour de force of the title piece, it is actually a shorter collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson that steals the show for me.    

In darkly amusing fashion, Blackshaw notes that the title piece was literally written “as a kind of endurance test,” as he pushed himself to his physical limit in the wake of his shoulder injury, as it temporarily seemed possible that he would never be able to play guitar again.  I would not necessarily describe it as an endurance test on the listening end, but it does remind me a bit of the 1948 film The Red Shoes in which a ballerina acquires a cursed pair of shoes that enable her to dance brilliantly but also supernaturally force her to dance herself to death.  As far as I know, Blackshaw himself is still alive and well, but “Unraveling In Your Hands” blows right past simply weaving a few gorgeous passages together and unfolds as an endlessly rippling and shapeshifting beast that simultaneously feels both freeform and incredibly intricate and complex. 

 Impressively, Blackshaw recorded the whole thing in a single unedited take, which is presumably why it feels so vibrant and spontaneous.  He mentions that some “flubs and hesitations” unavoidably crept into the piece, but I’ll be damned if I can find any significant missteps and probably wouldn’t have cared much if I did.  The overall effect is akin to Blackshaw having a guitar showdown with the devil at the proverbial crossroads, but continuing to play like a man possessed for another twenty minutes after resoundingly clowning his infernal adversary. 

The album is rounded out by a pair of shorter, less technically demanding pieces.  The closing “Why Keep Still?” was presumably the first piece that Blackshaw wrote for the album, as it was released when the then-nameless album was first announced last year.  Unsurprisingly, it is the most “textbook Blackshaw” piece on the album (though the ascending piano melody gives it a more loosely radiant feel than usual).  The other piece is a bit more divergent, however, and it is an absolute stunner.  Named in loving tribute to his departed dog, “Dexter” is remarkably simple for a Blackshaw piece, as it is centered around little more than an organ drone and a warm chord progression, but the harmonies are bittersweet and lovely and Glasson’s sliding, smearing, whistling, and murmuring strings transform the central motif into something fluidly sensuous.  In fact, it is easily one of the single most beautiful pieces that Blackshaw has ever recorded, which is doubly significant given the absence of any dazzling fretboard mastery.  While I am sincerely thrilled that Blackshaw’s shoulder eventually healed enough for him to regain his usual technical brilliance and certainly appreciated the go-for-broke performance of the title piece, it is easy to take for granted that he is also quite a soulful composer with a great ear for poignant melodies and cool transitions and that his guitar is merely one tool in a wider arsenal.  This album is an extremely welcome and oft-brilliant return.

Listen here.        

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James Blackshaw, “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” (Important, 2012)

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As much as I’ve always enjoyed Blackshaw’s work, solo acoustic guitar albums have never quite been my favorite thing and I always wished he would record something else as ambitious and divergent as The Glass Bead’s Game‘s “Cross” (or “Arc,” for that matter). However, James’ recent nylon string compositions have caused me to stop thinking that. Love is the Plan builds upon the promise of the similar Holly, but completely and dazzlingly eclipses it, striking the perfect balance between ¬†blur-fingered virtuosity and poignant melody. This is easily Blackshaw’s best album to date.

I must confess that I did not fall instantly in love with this album—in fact, I initially found it exasperating for a number of disparate reasons. The main one was that it essentially sounds like Holly II with a couple of digressions added to pad it out. I also thought that some of the nylon string pieces had some overly polite/pastoral stretches and that the two piano pieces were a bit baffling and aesthetically chameleonic. 

For example, “And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways” is a very unusual piece featuring vocals from Menace Ruine’s Genevieve Beaulieu that sounds like Blackshaw may have overstretched his ambitions into a disorienting stylistic no-man’s land that is equal parts jazz-via-Gershwin, torch song, medieval ballad, and spiritual. Then, the admittedly beautiful closer (“The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone”) goes an entirely different direction, opting for Romantic and melancholy Satie-esque simplicity. 

I suppose they share the theme of bittersweet sadness, but I was disappointed at how straightforward James’ piano playing was, given how adventurous he had been with “Arc” just a few short years ago. Curiously, I still think all of the above are perfectly valid observations, but they are all superficial and became largely insignificant once I was fully immersed in the album.

Blackshaw devotes four of the six songs to lengthy, intricate, and churning cascades of finger-picked nylon string arpeggios, so they are basically the meat of the album. James’ playing has evolved enormously since the Holly EP though, almost to a Faustian, met-the-devil-at-the-crossroads degree. Pieces like “We Who Stole the Dream” are quite simply on an entirely different level of depth, complexity, intensity, and emotion than I was expecting. 

As I listened to Love is the Plan more and more, I began to realize that almost every song on the album boasted at least one incredibly poignant or beautiful hook that I loved. That epiphany, though seemingly minor, completely changed how I listened to the album—instead of focusing on thoughts like “ugh-I wish that piano part wasn’t there,” I found myself happily anticipating the point in each song when it would cohere into an especially wonderful motif. Consequently, I gradually came to understand and appreciate how masterfully Blackshaw transitioned from theme to theme, endlessly building and releasing tension without ever losing momentum and urgency. It just took some time and focused attention for me to reach that point.

Of course, I still have absolutely no idea what to make of the piano pieces, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Both certainly have their merits—in fact, I actually enjoyed being totally wrong-footed by Beaulieu’s enigmatic, atemporal contribution. More importantly, Love is the Plan needs those two piano pieces to be there—James knew exactly what he was doing. 

Without them, the sequencing simply would not work and the guitar pieces would blur together and be denied their full impact. Similarly, the album’s flaws seem just as necessary, as the imperfections and odd digressions are both humanizing and endearing. I can’t stress enough how pleasantly surprised I am, as everything I want in an album is here: vibrancy, ambition, daring, great songwriting, and intimacy (every scrape and creak is audible, as is Blackshaw’s breathing). I don’t see how Blackshaw (or anyone else) could possibly surpass his nylon string playing here, both composition-wise and for sheer dexterousness. It must have taken an enormous amount of willpower for James to not spike his guitar on the floor and proclaim “Top that, suckers. I’m retiring.” when the final note was recorded. This is great.

Listen here.