Elijah Blake has a very capable voice. It's not super powerful, but it definitely has a range. You'll recognize his tendency to stay in the upper portion of that range in Usher's "Climax" which he wrote. Blake doesn't have an extensive writing history. Aside from "Climax," there's a couple credits for Keyshia Cole and a feature for Rick Ross. Even before then he was already signed to Def Jam (eventually through No I.D.'s imprint) as an artist and managed by RocNation. In 2012, he released his first real anything Bijoux 22, a free 8-song EP. It was incredible. Not in years had a male voice made R&B music that was so emotionally significant. The songs on Bijoux were miles ahead of any romance equation that makes up Chris Brown and Ne-Yo songs and whatever hip-hop trends Trey Songz was adopting. The one song that fell into those categories was of course the one Def Jam chose to go with as a single. Close to two years later, this EP has over 40 plays in my iTunes. I really, really like it.
Drift, the first official release from Blake, one that follows Def Jam's EP first until you prove you're hot and then an album unreasonably soon after, is not quite as good as Bijoux 22. It's a similar structure — 8 songs, including an awful one with J. Cole that was the followup to the awful one with Common. It isn't too sonically impressive. There's a clear distinction between the songs No I.D. did and the ones he didn't. If the writing on Bijoux was an A, the writing here is a borderline B/B+. "Strange Fruit" turns a blown opportunity of a song title into a mediocre club record. The centerpiece is "6," a tale of being physically punished by his father and the effects it had on his life.
The bad news is that this EP isn't making him a star the way it worked for Jhene and August Alsina. The good news is that Def Jam may not care about the numbers. It probably wasn't ever meant for radio, but it's really cool that "6" was the first single. In a perfect world, we see more of the last three songs of Bijoux in the full-length.
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