The second track to be released from James Blake's upcoming album Trying Times, I Had A Dream She Took My Hand, is on the surface, one ravishingly simple song. With its fifties doo wop style backing singers shimmying deeply within the mix. It is, nonetheless, infused with Blake's characteristic plaintive vocals, and fish tank orchestrations. This has the feel of something that is both contemporary and the evocation of some dreamy nostalgia that exists only in the post modern imagination. Following on after The Death of Love, this bodes well for the album, that he himself is already trumpeting as his best.
I Had A Dream She took My Hand, takes place in this imaginative fantasy of a love affair that may or may not yet be happening in reality. But given it's literal musical echoes of both past and present swirling around in its pool of yearning, this song luxuriates entirely in its internalised state of cultivated intoxication, which visualises a love requited. In the hands of a less sensitive artist, it might these days appear unconsciously creepy. But Blake's pure vocal lines maintain a healthy line of dreamy innocence, of an uncomplicated love seeking a hand to hold.
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