Hopefully, Ocean’s latest journey in cerebral, non-macho, boundary-free R&B will be heard long after the fuss has died down. We care more about the circumstances of an album’s release these days than the music itself.
ANIME VISUAL WITH FRANK OCEAN BLONDE ALBUM HOW TO
Choruses by the Beatles and the Carpenters are stripped of their words and worked into new songs, but these tricks add little, when Ocean already knows how to write a tune like Stevie Wonder (Skyline To). Other interludes are expendable, such as Facebook Story, in which the French producer SebastiAn recites a moronic modern parable about social media. Pretty Sweet reaches heights of holy dissonance with an off-key children’s choir, a sound-clash reflected in the mad, atonal piano of André 3000 (the only instantly recognisable guest) on Solo (Reprise). There’s church music in their DNA: Nights (“I wanna see Nirvana, but don’t wanna die yet”) ends with a polyphony of Franks, like a gospel choir warming up in an empty hall. Image of Frank Ocean, shot by Nabil for Oyster Magazine.The largely beatless tracks are more abstract than those on Channel Orange, and reveal themselves as lush and atmospheric over time. Stand outs: Pink + White, Ivy, Solo, Siegfried What it could mean for you, I don’t know, but I hope you’ll give it a listen. To me, Blonde is happiness and discovery. The songs highlight and narrate relatable highs and lows. In my life, Frank Ocean’s Blonde was the background music to a long car ride down a dark winding road as some friends and I headed to the city with only our voices and the headlights.
ANIME VISUAL WITH FRANK OCEAN BLONDE ALBUM FULL
It’s not so dissimilar to real life, when your heart rushes and rages but also sometimes feels like it’s full of ice. Everything on this album, and particularly this song, is delivered with the confidence of someone just trying to figure it out, stumbling and skinning a knee, and then shrugging it off with cockiness in spite of the sting.īlonde feels a bit like a speeding train towards the middle, rising in both anxiety and passion. Self Control is cheekily confident as Ocean boasts, “I’ll be the boyfriend in your wet dreams tonight”, but once again manages to sound vulnerable due to the ambience of the instrumentals. In a more somber setting, we also receive a glimpse into the life of a young adolescent on the receiving end of a mother’s well-meaning but aggressive rhetoric about drug use and similar lifestyle choices in the phone-call sketch track Be Yourself: “This is mom: call me.
"I thought that I was dreaming when you said you love me He reminds us that we all eventually grow up, and the ways we learn lessons by tiptoeing through insecurities, bumping into them, getting surprised: Ivy is a wistful and earnest recalling of childhood and the beginnings of a young love story. There's a bull and a matador dueling in the sky "It's hell on Earth and the city's on fire While I might not have been solo when I first heard it, the song represents a beautiful, bittersweet feeling of loneliness and desperation: I remember my heart growing bigger than the sky as I made out with my second sort-of-boyfriend in his messy college room to Ocean’s blossoming run here. Ocean gives a spiritual performance as he moves from low to high, microcosmic to macrocosmic, and sings about the constellations. Here, cussing is juxtaposed with a gentle organ, a surprising addition to a rap album, and small, sharp whistling accents. The track called Solo has remained a transcendent experience for me every time I hear it. It’s simple and clean and gives Ocean the space to play with this sparseness for the album’s remainder. Frank Ocean balances the past, the future, and the gratitude for both good and bad experiences.īlonde has a vulnerable start with a sparse tone, only a lone guitar populating the background. He is having a conversation with himself, referencing the consumerism that Nike promotes. Back to the first track ‘Nikes’, this is the introduction song. Before I start analyzing this track, I would like to say that the order of this album is important, it tells a story.
Listening to it now, having just graduated from college and stumbling into young adulthood with one foot in the nostalgic mire, it well encapsulates the transition into what? for a twenty-something like me. I am going to walk through each track on Frank Ocean’s album ‘Blonde’.
Blonde is lengthy but well worth your time as the perfect album for late nights and languid mornings. I believe that what makes the album so special is that its rap can be best summarized as sentimental, which is sometimes a rarity for the genre. This review will instead detail the ways in which Blonde taps into the uncertain and poignant emotions of youth. Considering that Frank Ocean’s Blonde album has been out for a couple of years now, there are plenty of articles dissecting its meaning and form.
0 kommentar(er)
