Heralding the crooner’s vocals overlooks the structural songwriting and intentional omissions in Blonde. He welcomes pop in grayscale tones, choosing acoustic and electric guitars over traditional synth and bass-heavy R&B.īlonde is more than its lack of beats and it’s certainly more than Ocean’s voice. He doesn’t sketch his choruses with the production of a radio hit. Whatever the topic, the album presents his brand of minimalism in the guise of lazing. He examines homoerotic desires (“Self Control”), fractured love (“Good Guy”), substance abuse (“Skyline To”), and family values (“Futura Free”). At 28 years old, Ocean grapples with this style of avant-garde in a profoundly understated way. This qualifies as minimalist avant-garde the reflection of what’s perceived to be known and the dismantling of it into reworded lessons, something that challenges what you know, what you’ve been taught, what you’ve learned, and then questions what remains, what can be discovered, what’s still ignorantly regarded as truth. (Read: Album Review: Frank Ocean – Endless)
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Blonde is full of rough transitions left that way on purpose. It’s the crinkled audio of his mother warning him about drugs and alcohol on “Be Yourself” then followed by acid tabs and lines of cocaine getting diva delivery on “Solo”. But his creative process is still fueled by perfectionism, the type which wakes up early to style intentionally disheveled hair. Ocean makes Blonde look like a hasty, albeit beautiful, college final. The CD’s tracklist differs from the official stream’s. Several of the zines feature alternate covers. Apple Music spells the album title with an “e” whereas Boys Don’t Cry printed Blond. The release brings to light Ocean’s trademark melange. The hard part is boiling it down to a manageable consistency. He knows what he wants Blonde to sound like. The list of engineers alone shows Ocean’s attention to mastering that there’s Jeff Ellis from Channel ORANGE, Bob Ludwig (The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana), Sam Petts-Davies (Radiohead), Matt Mysko (James Blake), Joe Visciano (David Bowie, Jamie xx), and more. There’s a focus on the vibe of lo-fi confessionalism though the production is undoubtedly high-fi. Acoustic guitar plucks and triangles ring in the distance. James Blake’s presence is felt for the first of many times, potentially through influence alone. As filtered through technology as it is, “Nikes” feels deceptively human, Ocean’s voice driving like a nail between eeriness and romance. The only single is album opener “Nikes”, a reverb-filled song that echoes drum pads and distorts vocal melodies. Unlike fellow surprise album artists Rihanna and Kanye West, Ocean isn’t here for radio play. There’s a reason he needed years to create Blonde: The album’s rich with influences and thoughts, and shaving them into a cohesive full-length takes, to say the least, quite some time. Ocean trades the accessibility of Channel ORANGE’s conventionalism for the accessibility of purified emotion. To return with a record as spacious as Blonde takes confidence, and yet the deeper the album’s explored, the more it seems to be an acceptance of fragility. On Saturday, the 17-track full-length was made available - some in physical CD form for those who grabbed his zine, Boys Don’t Cry, at pop-up stores. The continuous teasing of a new record, drawn out by overeager fans, made Ocean’s return nerve-wracking, even after a live-stream video came and went, visual album Endless appeared, and a music video dropped. Then again, no one could predict what he would return with, or if he would return at all.Īfter the release of Grammy-winning Channel ORANGE and 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra, Ocean was flooded with fame, a level of attention he avoided: dodging press, turning down guest verses, deleting his Twitter.
No one imagined Frank Ocean would return after four years of silence with an album of minimalist, avant-garde R&B, yet here we are, Blonde in hand.
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