![]() ![]() ![]() Not only does that sell the album short, but it rather misses the point. One writer, in a somewhat favourable review, claimed it wasn’t “packed with the kind of shiny hooks and banging beats associated with blockbuster pop”. Some critics would have you believe Blonde is a completely tuneless affair. There was the 45-minute visual album Endless to tide over desperate fans little did they know that it possessed the weirdest songs of Ocean’s career, that is until Blonde. It was supposedly due out July 2015, then July of this year, then a fortnight before it became available to stream on Apple Music. Then again, if it wasn’t necessarily the promise of more music like Channel Orange – an incredible work, audibly under the influence of 70s Stevie Wonder, albeit twisted into something singular yet accessible – then at least some of the anticipation can be levelled at Blonde’s delayed release. Unlike D’Angelo’s Black Messiah or Portishead’s Third, it hasn’t taken nearly a decade to materialise we’ve only had to wait four years which, truth be told, isn’t all that much. For some time after, any appearance Ocean made on record was met with rapturous excitement and intrigue – his warm, honeyed voice graced the tumbling Jay-Z/Kanye West collab No Church in the Wild. Making Ocean both a critical darling and the recipient of an intensely loyal fanbase, the profound reverence it attracted was so strong it made people want more. ![]() In some ways, it was: the genre nowadays is suffused with the same unsettled, narcotic aura that record established, whether it be Drake’s skewed, solipsistic interpretation, the druggy fugue state of the Weeknd or leftfield outsiders like FKA twigs and Miguel. Channel Orange’s arrival was heralded, by some, as the future of R&B. To call Frank Ocean’s follow-up to his critically-acclaimed debut, Channel Orange, highly-anticipated is a grave understatement. Nevertheless, it’s a stunning demonstration of his remarkable talents ★★★★★ In the wake of his Endless visual album, Frank Ocean’s hotly-anticipated Blonde actively resists the relatively straightforward songwriting punch of his 2012 breakthrough Channel Orange. ![]()
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