there's a limit to their love
The folks at The Singles Jukebox dissect one of my top 9 from 2010, James Blake’s cover of Limit to Your Love. Some love it…
There are cover versions that are curios, accoutrements, or goof-offs, another jaunty tune or standard in your arsenal. But James Blake has bigger ideas here: “Limit to Your Love” is an underground music Hallelujah or Hurt, a cover that treats its forebear as a blueprint yet to be fully realised. Feist’s original is jaunty, warm, comforting. Blake’s is a spare beast wracked with tension, even pain — some kind of devotional cleansing, a confessional of sorts wrought in music.
And some hate it…
Forget dubstep; this is a high school glee club audition. You know, the kind where you walk into the choir room and sing a pop song, except James decided he’d go with a Feist album track to be hip. He wheedles and closed-eye emotes his way through, reaaaaally slowly, as the bewildered accompanist plods alongside him, throwing in some harder chords to amuse himself. … Eventually James finishes and leaves, prompting the entire audition committee to let gush their pent-up laughter. Except that part isn’t in the song. It should be.
See also OK Cupid’s latest blog post, The Mathematics of Beauty.