A girl snaps a huge bubble from her chewing gum. She sucks the shrapnel back in to her mouth, takes the ball between her fingers and stretches it awayyy from her face until it's barely a string. Then she twirls it around a finger, slowly gathering the gum back up into a whole. She skins it off her finger, gives it a chew, fills up another big one, and lets it POP!

This is what a James Blake song is like.

There is so much tension, so much time that elapses between those moments of gratification, that it always borders on driving you crazy. Last year's three EPs - The Bells Sketch, CMYK, and Klavierwerke - are experiments in teasing out little snippets of gorgeousness, a distorted R&B hook here, a couple notes of piano there, while grounding the listener in these stretchy, spacey, pulsating beats. You never know when to expect the payout, and it's usually gone before you can get your hands around it. He just has a brilliant and totally original sense of time and space that takes a little getting used to but can reorient how you expect to be stimulated by a song.

JB is movin up in the world, beyond the beats and into the traditional song format. But he brought all his tricks with him, and the result is essentially an R&B album but unlike any you've heard. The combination is bizarre but very exciting.

This Feist cover is the perfect example of what's possible. The original is rich and lovely and everything you want in a song, but by stripping it down to a few key parts and filling in the rest with little ticks and wobbles - dark matter - and a heavy dose of force-fed patience, you get something else altogether: tense and unsentimental, but beautiful in its own right. It's a style that implicates rather than tells you outright what to feel or hear or whatever it is you want to experience in music.