Album Review: Blond by Frank Ocean

Frank Ocean ended years of near-silence with the sparse, visual album Endless. Then came Blond: an expansive hymnbook of gargantuan achievement. Frankly, we’re not worthy.

Considering the hype, Frank Ocean’s long-delayed follow-up to Channel Orange would need to raise the dead just to meet casual fan expectations.

Looking at the album’s liner notes, it seems that Blond, his latest, has managed to do just that.

David Bowie, Elliott Smith and the Beatles all get a shout-out as “album contributors” on its accompanying zine (handed out in a few cities across the world but handily Instagrammed, Tweeted and Tumbled for our perusal).

They would be an impressive haul of collaborators even if you set aside the fact that Bowie, Smith and at least two Beatles shuffled off this mortal coil prior to Blond’s release (and, in the case of John Lennon, seven years before Ocean’s birth). Yet, we’d be remiss to not mention their deadness.

No, Blond is not the work of necromancy. (As with many of his album credits, Ocean’s merely interpolated some classic Beatles and Smith lyrics; Bowie’s influence remains elusive.)

Rather, it’s vulnerable and mortal. On it, Ocean shares the same fears and concerns as anyone: the passage of time (“We’ll never be those kids again,” he croons on “Ivy”), the terrifying world around him (“RIP Trayvon, that n**** look just like me,” on album-opener “Nikes”) and an overbearing mother (“This is mom, call me,” ends the sweet, assertive voicemail on “Be Yourself”).

In a way, however, Blond is indeed a communion with the dead, or at least, the past. In each track, he reflects on long lost summers, longer, loster loves and, as on the Beatles-sampling “White Ferrari”, ephemerality: “If you think about it, it’s over in no time; the best life.”

On Channel Orange, his major-label debut, he was thinking ‘bout forever. Here, forever’s already in the rear-view mirror. We would caution the 28-year-old to pump the brakes on his existential terror, if it wasn’t producing such miraculous music.

The hypnotic first single, “Nikes”, is an entrancing, conflicted battle between fakery and authenticity (aided by a reality-busting music video). “Solo”, with its jagged stream-of-consciousness verses speeding towards anthemic chorus, is matched only by “Solo (Reprise)”, featuring Andre 3000 with a speedier stream-of-consciousness. “Ivy”, meanwhile, might be Frank's most accessible song to date (yes, more than “Novacane”), thanks to its tragic tale of first-love gone sour.

Jangly guitars, sumptuous strings, church organs and pitched-up, “Push The Little Daisies”-esque vocals recur throughout, adding a wholeness that was lacking in Channel Orange. Words, sadly, don’t fully paint the album’s sonic picture. Let's say: the boundaries of R&B and hip-hop (genres that never fully contained Frank, anyway) have been well and truly pushed, if not outright melted, by Blond.

However, to return to our first point, the record was not simply magicked up by spirits. A person made it, and in many ways, it's an album about being a person. We call Frank Ocean enigmatic, but Blond exposes everything, from his fear of impermanence to his sexuality.

(Even the album title – Blond on both versions of the album artwork; Blonde according to iTunes – seems to reference his bisexuality by alternating between the masculine and feminine spelling of the word in French; a theory co-signed by Ocean’s brother.)

Lyrically, it’s haunting and heart-hurt. Frank speaks throughout the record of a kinship with the late Trayvon Martin and murdered pop star Selena; elsewhere, including in the zine, he muses on the odds of dying in his beloved muscle cars. It’s also funny, at times, and often inscrutable. Above all, it’s the work of an artist deserving attention and interpretation; Blond basically justifies our cultural round-the-clock ‘Frank Watch’.

Lines cribbed from Elliott Smith (“just a fond farewell to a friend”) and the Beatles (“each day of the year”), in their new context, carry devastating meaning. As a collage of sound and poetry, so too does Blond.

5/5

Blond is now streaming on Apple Music.