With an industry in free fall and the album increasingly becoming an irrelevant form in an age of streaming and instant downloading it’s heartening that an album can still be an event. Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, and Kanye West streaming The Life of Pablo live from Madison Square Garden showed that a record can still be at the centre of our culture. With everyone talking about it and weighing in with their opinions in a way that is increasingly reserved for box set TV. Frank Ocean’s Blonde, or Blond, and the accompanying Endless is the latest of these event albums. The spectacle of which included shifting release dates, an enigmatic visual accompaniment and a 300-page magazine given away for free, now available to purchase off eBay for price margins that are well into the thousands. Alongside their buzz-generating capabilities, another thing these records have in common is the dizzying amount of collaborators involved in their creation. By and large, it’s not obvious what most of them actually did. In this context Ocean becomes more than just an artist. He’s a curator or almost a film director. Filtering a whole team of people’s skills and talents through his singular vision in order to build a cohesive whole.

That doesn’t mean Frank’s vision isn’t an opaque one. We’re immediately given an indicator of this on the opening track ‘Nikes’. Where the first time we hear his voice, he’s processed it by pitching it higher. It’s a trick he returns to frequently but often feels unnecessary. On ‘Nikes’ it functions only to withhold his voice from us that little bit longer. After we’ve waited to hear it on new music for so long. It can be a remarkably sparse record as well. ‘Pink’ is – for the most part – just Frank’s voice and a lo-fi recording of a chorus-heavy guitar. Not miles away from the music of DIY indie artist Alex G, who is listed as a collaborator on the two projects. There are choruses here, but the meandering melodies feel conversational in their rhythm. They creep up on you unexpectedly, never introduced without any grand sentiment. With it booming low-end and sample heavy instrumentation, ‘Nights’ might be the closest thing Blond has to a banger, but eventually moves into a more dark and murky space. It’s also one of Frank’s most cryptic explorations between himself and the past: “Did you call me from a séance? / You were from a past life”. ‘Pink + White’ is probably the closest thing we get to the soulful slow jams that invoke the cloudless blue summer skies of Channel Orange. Completed with cinematic strings and softly strummed acoustic guitar, it’s one of the few moments that sound like the album-of-the-summer many probably hoped this record would be.

When Frank Ocean wrote a letter to the Internet describing his experience of falling in love with a man, he became a figurehead of an intersectional identity-politics between race and sexuality that still remains at the forefront of our society four years later. But Blond is only passingly political. Police brutality against minorities appear flickeringly, buried amongst other references.

“R.I.P Trayvon / That N—a look just like me” he tells us on ‘Nikes’ a song up to that point mainly critiquing consumerism. Making it all the more jarring but also deeply sad. His experiences of living in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina can also be glimpsed. But it is always through the personal. The political is largely implied.

The interludes, backed by a sweetly nostalgic synth lines, are on the surface kind of mundane but weirdly touching. The coda of ‘Futura Free’, collaging together interviews recorded with Frank’s brother and friends while they were just kids, captures the carefree hopes and dreams of youth in its most raw materials. ‘Be Yourself’ is, on one level, a humorous phone message left by someone’s mum on the dangers of drug use. But her central point of having faith in your own identity seems to create a rippling effect across the album as it progresses. A recurring theme seems to be the very contemporary difficulties that get in the way of our ability to love. Whether it's distorted and perverted by technology, such as the anecdote told on ‘Facebook Story’, drug usage or broader political society preventing more altruistic versions of love. ‘Solo’ at first glance seems a celebration of debauchery and the bachelor lifestyle. Later in the song – and in the show stopping reprise featuring Andre 3000 –, “solo” morphs into “so low”. The slippage between the two uses captures the desire to be free and independent but also wanting to stop the loneliness warded off by connection and intimacy.

Frequently intriguing, occasionally questionable, and sometimes awe-inspiringly beautiful. Blond is a challenging listen in a way that most albums that reach its level of exposure these days just aren’t. Anyone expecting the straightforward R’n’B hits of Channel Orange will be disappointed. Blond is altogether much more abstruse. Reluctant to reveal itself all at once, it remains to be seen whether it ever will completely. But there’s an intimacy here between artist and listener that goes beyond the mere confessional lyric, extending to pure, inarticulate feeling. On ‘Futura Free’ he confesses: “Play these songs it’s therapy momma, they paying me momma / I should be paying them” and then he switches to address us directly. “I should be paying y’all, honest to God”. If anyone’s album deserves that you take your time with it, it’s Frank’s. For his sake, as well as ours.
Louis Ormesher

Website: boysdontcry.co
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