Blonde

For the first time in a long time, an artist riding on hype surfaced with an album that lives up to the very hype that lifted it. Better yet, in time, Blonde will surpass its hype. The album’s greatest feat is its ability to expand when it’s listened to in a new mindset, each reveal seemingly so apparent that you wonder how you missed it the first time.

With these 17 tracks, Ocean shows himself to be one of pop’s foremost innovators.

The entire album plays like an Ocean view, clear and uncluttered by outsized cameos.

Realign your expectations, and what gradually emerges is a record of enigmatic beauty, intoxicating depth and intense emotion.

Beautifully more simple than any of our mythmaking delusions, Blonde is Ocean’s life as he experiences it: fluid and fluctuating, one man in motion. This is what freedom sounds like.

On the whole, Blonde is more assured and consistent than Channel Orange. It inherits the bagginess of his overstuffed debut, but lacks the thrill of groundbreaking novelty. Frank Ocean is an outlier, an artist who can produce an album this phenomenal and nevertheless fall a bit short.

This is an album of mostly beatless soul whose heart nevertheless pumps vividly and loudly throughout its 17 tracks. [No. 136, p.61]

Uninterested in zipping from A to B, it is instead a moving, repeatedly devastating depiction of an artist who is still trying to figure out his place in the world as he moves forward in life, ever mindful of what we leave behind, the things said and left unspoken, the good and the bad that comes with trying to make it all make sense and the sobering knowledge that we cannot go back.

It demands your attention, but more importantly, it deserves it too. This is the sound of an artist in complete control, full of confidence and dazzling flair.

It’s just about impossible to live up to the hype that an album like this has been subjected to, but Ocean comes pretty close. Blonde is often a bit of a sprawling mess, but with some patience it becomes one of the most rewarding albums you’ll hear all year.

Blonde is a work of art that will stick with us all for way longer than four short years.

Blonde is the sound of an artist urging his listener to be patient, and in this age of instant gratification, it is a refreshing, rewarding triumph.

The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core.

Vibrant, it colours outside the lines. Poignant, it's transparent with altering modes of bravado, vulnerability and desperation. It is, thoroughly, a Frank Ocean album, yearning for perfection, sating the audience's hunger for dynamism, yet with the persistent feeling that the artist feels it's all a failure.

Much of the rest of Blonde is far less accessible than its predecessor. And that's not a bad thing.

As Blonde gets closer to the finish line, the same themes get explored again and again with a more collagelike musicality.

The sum is Ocean’s most thorough reading of his world to date. [Oct 2016, p.65]

This is music that fascinates on first listen but requires multiple spins for its complexities and idiosyncrasies to take hold.

The sprawling haziness still lingers, but the songs are sharper and studded with guests. [Nov 2016, p.24]

These records might not eclipse Channel Orange, but they have their own mercurial gleam, mapping the spaces between people, reaching for a hazy intimacy that almost feels real. [Nov 2016, p.112]

It’s a beguiling, meandering sprawl that rewards total immersion.

For every low point there’s the unquestionable standouts.

[Endless and Blond(e)] are great--but they require time and, realistically, a step-back from the extraordinary (and sometimes ludicrous) hype that necessitates Ocean’s new works be either masterpieces or a complete let-down.

In his songs, Ocean is not in control. In fact, he is attractively lost.

The words on record are breathtaking for their deep focus, which is microscopic to the point of vaguery. Frank Ocean’s lyrics describe such specific scenes that their vocabulary is unmistakably about someone else, his own worlds within our own.

Frank’s rich sense of storytelling is still here, it’s just fragmented. But once Blonde’s ambiguity begins to piece together, it becomes something remarkable.

While most artists would have drowned under the pressure, hype, anticipation and scale of an album like Blonde, he passes with flying colors, making him not only one of the most unique R&B artists of our time, but also one of the best as well.

What results is a subtle study in duality, anchored by a single overt guest appearance--Andre 3000’s prickly, gymnastic verse on “Solo (Reprise)”--that, like an abstract of the album in miniature, manically splits off in a dozen topical directions at once.

The first half of Blonde is astonishing, sustained beauty. The second is more distant, closer to the shower improvs of Friday’s sounds-like-a-soundtrack-and-it-is Endless.

The music is sparer than it was on Channel Orange--more mature, jammed less feverishly with ideas--but adventurous nonetheless.

Only a handful of songs are beat-driven, but the electronic sounds are often subtle and organic. It’s rare for any one element to overtake his voice in the mix, but there are times when he fades out.

Blonde is dewy, radiant and easeful, with an approach to incantatory soul that evolves moment to moment. It’s feverish but unhurried, a slowly smoldering set that’s emphatic about loneliness.

This surprising effort answers breathless hype not with shouts but with one long exhalation.

Blonde makes for sensationally beautiful background music that can morph into a bizarre hodgepodge of disparate ideas when you concentrate on bringing it into the foreground.

An undoubtedly reactive work, this is undiluted and progressive nonetheless.

Much of Blonde sounds more like a minimalist soft rock record with its sparse, isolationist guitars and pianos; little to no drums; and choruses that fade into the rest of Frank’s dense, congested lyrics.