![]() ![]() Other interludes are expendable, such as Facebook Story, in which the French producer SebastiAn recites a moronic modern parable about social media. Pretty Sweet reaches heights of holy dissonance with an off-key children’s choir, a sound-clash reflected in the mad, atonal piano of André 3000 (the only instantly recognisable guest) on Solo (Reprise). There’s church music in their DNA: Nights (“I wanna see Nirvana, but don’t wanna die yet”) ends with a polyphony of Franks, like a gospel choir warming up in an empty hall. The largely beatless tracks are more abstract than those on Channel Orange, and reveal themselves as lush and atmospheric over time. Seigfried captures a feeling of cosmic detachment: “I can’t relate to my peers/ I’d rather live outside/ I’d rather chip my pride than lose my mind out here.” Blonde is a collection of quiet moments from the man who’s worked hard to make himself the most talked about thing on the internet. Solo is the sweet, homoerotically charged account of the space left behind by a toking buddy who is gone (“Now your baby momma ain’t so vicious, all she wants is her picket fence”). You find yourself caring anew about the “I” of these songs, who is reflected in snatches of impressionistic poetry, in sunlight, summer smoke and boxer shorts. There is still the powerful sense of a veiled introvert, and of the unlikely intimacy he achieves within this pose. The largely beatless tracks reveal themselves as lush and atmospheric over timeĭespite all this, Ocean has managed to preserve the musical personality that marked him out as special on 2012’s immersive, psychedelic R&B game-changer, Channel Orange. In the album credits, Ocean thanks pretty much everyone in popular music from Bowie to the Beatles – but he neglects to say who’s doing what, or if they’re doing anything at all. There followed a 45-minute visual album called Endless, and finally the real thing emerged – in a physical version which included a 360-page magazine featuring an interview with his mum, and as an iTunes-only download (a snub to Jay-Z’s Tidal service and, as the veteran industry ranter Bob Lefsetz saw it, a snub to Ocean’s fans). There were months of false starts, then a cryptic video about the album’s construction which showed Ocean lathing away at mysterious lumps of wood. I t should now be possible to separate Frank Ocean’s new album from the eye-poppingly pretentious way in which it was released.
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