Frank Ocean

Blonde

For an album that is at times intentionally difficult to follow - for all its vague and indistinct meanderings between subjects, between minds and bodies, between place and time, Blonde remains a highly accessible album - and not just sonically.

Blonde is chaotic. 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.

If casual fans looking for simpler, catchier grooves to vibe to don't get it, then so be it. Judging by the way that Ocean sings without abandon on Blonde, he's well aware of what his true fans need.

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

Blonde delves even further into Ocean’s creeping sense of mortality than Endless, but with the kind of focused songwriting and production values befitting the intense level of fan expectation that preceded its release.

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.

Vulnerabilities are present, intra-relationship conversations are not left to easy cliches, Ocean feels never less than real.

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.

No gimmicks, no massive production. Just beautiful songs with depth, feeling and passion.

There is still the powerful sense of a veiled introvert, and of the unlikely intimacy he achieves within this pose. 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.

In its defiant strangeness, Blonde should be celebrated as part of a generational shift away from the obvious in pop, as a new mood of serious artistic daring permeates an increasingly soul-searching hip-hop culture.

Frank Ocean doesn't disappoint on this highly-anticipated followup to his breakout album Channel Orange.

With 44 credited contributors, some of them literal and some very much spiritual, over 17 songs ... the only thought given to consistency is that consistency has no place in reality or the narrative arc of this album.

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

There’s a reason why this could be considered his attempt at writing an album akin to Sgt. Pepper: as Ocean consciously sets a very clear tone with some intrepid experimentation, he finds to way to put the focus almost entirely on thought-provoking sentiments.

Blonde is of instances, of stretches and yawns, creativity in recreation, invisible labor, a time-lapse collapsed into one space.

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

Frank is rarely completely straightforward on Blonde, but many of the best moments come when he gets closer to it.

Less structured and song-oriented than Channel Orange, it’s a long, meandering ramble through Ocean’s passing interests and attitudes, hopes and memories ... delivered in an undulating sprechstimme that seems to be avoiding the difficult choice of a compelling melody.