Channel Orange
- Frank Ocean
- Band Name: Frank Ocean
- Record Label: Def Jam
- Release Date: Jul 17, 2012
- Critic Score
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Aug 2, 2012100In throwing his emotional locker wide open, Frank Ocean has made a tender, engrossing classic.
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Jul 24, 2012100Ocean brings substance with style, rather than style demanding to be considered substance.
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Jul 24, 2012100Channel Orange is so arrestingly smooth that all of its unusually shaped pieces fit together as a seamless whole.
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Jul 18, 2012100It's simultaneously of the moment and an undeniable classic.
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Jul 18, 2012100For now, the best tribute you can pay Channel Orange is that, while it plays, you forget about the chatter and just luxuriate in a wildly original talent.
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Jul 18, 2012100Even though other recent interviews and richly realized tracks like those imply that Ocean's songwriting is just a vessel, his own devil is still in the details, and that's what makes his music compelling.
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Jul 18, 2012100Channel Orange is as dazzling as it is baffling, rarely staying still long enough to get a grip on.
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Jul 27, 201295Ignore whatever purist backlash you may encounter. In Channel Orange, we have been granted a truly classic document, perhaps the very first that feels synchronized with the present decade.
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Jul 18, 201295While Channel Orange is stuffed with one-of-a-kind details and characters, its overall scope is grand, as is Ocean's.
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Jul 18, 201294No matter what Ocean's mood is on the album, the songs sound fantastic.... it's one of the best albums of the year.
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Jul 20, 201291The musical craft on this almost sampleless album is so even-keeled that there's no song here as forgettable as "There Will Be Tears" or "Dust" either.
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Jul 18, 201291In addition to being one of the year's most soberingly bleak R&B releases, Channel Orange is also one of the prettiest.
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Jul 25, 201290Vastly rich... Ocean's voice is a thing of beauty – clear, crisp and almost, divine – he speaks of truth in an unabashed manner.
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Jul 24, 201290The combination of his idiosyncratic creative mind with his highly personal and conflicted lyrics has resulted in something spectacular.
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Jul 23, 201290Beyond genre lines, racial lines, sexuality lines, any lines you can think of, it's that all-too-rare gem: a universal story you'll come back to long after the hype's been and gone.
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Jul 20, 201290It stands tall as the best R&B album in a long while, if not the best album in a long while.
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Jul 18, 201290Channel Orange is a staggering step upwards from Nostalgia.
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Jul 18, 201290Channel Orange demands to be listened to in a single sitting.
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Jul 18, 201290Channel ORANGE feels like one long, moonlit, air-conditioned ride.
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Jul 18, 201290Channel Orange hasn't so much been crafted into being as grown from the passion of one man, an extension of the Frank Ocean psyche into audible form.
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Jul 18, 201290Channel Orange is so textured, complex, and mature that Ocean's recent coming out feels like a footnote, rather than the entire story. It's a revelation that only further colors the tales of longing and disappointment found on this impressive album.
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Jul 18, 201290This is more than an album, this is a moment in music history. Enjoy it.
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Jul 18, 201290The album doesn't have as many slyly powerful hooks as Nostalgia, Ultra, but Ocean's descriptive and subtle storytelling is taken to a higher level.
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Jul 19, 201289It's a headphone masterpiece that bangs on shelf speakers.
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Jul 19, 201288The music is powerful, but the moods and mental space Channel Orange occupies are often macabre.
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Jul 18, 201288Channel Orange creates a state of mind with words and sound.
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Jul 18, 201287The compassionate understanding of human nature, is the guiding ethos behind Channel Orange, a very beautiful album about not-so-beautiful people.
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Jul 27, 201286Channel Orange is going to be the standard to beat for some time. And it might very well be the best R&B album of our young decade.
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Jul 18, 201283Ocean is less concerned with urban realism than with his own '80s-noir fantasy of what the city's like, and his music captures that vibe perfectly, pulsing with electro-soul grooves, vintage jazz-funk.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 77 out of 86
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Mixed: 2 out of 86
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Negative: 7 out of 86
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10one word...beautiful.
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10
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