James Blake’s eponymous debut is an ethereal opening shot for the young artist from across the pond, all of 22 years old. Blake seems to revel in aggregating all of the subtleties of his influences, combining them into sometimes soulful, and sometimes psychedelic electronica. Peppering each track with a voice that sounds aged well beyond his years, one way to describe this work to the uninitiated is to have them imagine that Luther Vandross had locked himself into a recording studio after taking a heroic dose of acid. It’s an approach that suits him well, and it makes this initial salvo worthwhile even though it wears a little thin as the album progresses.

Blake has the remarkable ability to take very simplistic mantras and spin them into sophisticated tracks full of intricate beats and stunning vocals. This is to say, also, man this guy can sing. Take “I Never Learnt to Share,” the album’s third song. Grounded by the most basic lyric, “My brother and my sister don’t speak to me/ But I don’t blame them,” countless vocal layers and shimmering synthesizers build to cascading, raved up coda. On paper this shouldn’t work: a British singer with a voice meant for soul, fusing disparate elements of electronica and wrapping them around solitary, plaintive lyrics. But it does. The best tracks on the album reveal new intricacies upon each re-listen, the subtle piano melody underneath “Wilhelms Scream” or the barely perceptible guitar that floats in the background of “Lindesfarne I.” His cover of Feist’s “Limit To Your Love,” from her 2007 release The Reminder, is utterly brilliant. Alternating between a straight forward reading and dubbed out R+B, it will easily make your year end “best of 2011” list regardless of what comes in the remaining 9 months. It is very tough for what is essentially an electronic work to transcend its, well, electronicness. These tracks succeed in doing just that, crossing many stylistic boundaries without firmly camping out in any of them.

That is also the paradox of this album because chunks of it also get too cute in attempting to get that balance just right. The same reason it works on the aforementioned tracks, the vocal experimentation and subtle layering of beats and samples, are the same reasons some of its cuts fail. In the end it puts a drag on the momentum of the album, any work that is only 38 minutes in length shouldn’t feel long but James Blake does. Maybe I just can’t get past the nails-on-a-chalkboard annoying vocal loops on “I Mind,” it makes the 3:34 minute 10th track feel like a lifetime. The unnamed female guest vocalist on “To Care (like you)” doesn’t necessarily hurt but the vocal samples of himself and its overcooked beats do. Or maybe it’s the plodding tempo that permeates virtually every track on the album, it works for the first two thirds but you find yourself wishing for a little dynamic range by the time your reach the gospel tinged “Measurements,” the eleventh and final track.

It is easy to forget that this is only his debut, with nary a handful of EP’s released prior. It is such a polished record, with obvious attention to every minute detail, good or bad. One can only wonder at what he is capable of once he gets a little experience under his belt. Until then I am off to listen to “Limit to your Love” for the 38th time so that maybe I can forget that “I Mind” ever happened.