Even the sunnier moments have a cold vein running through them. The album, like the mixtape, is broken up with bursts of radio static, fragments of conversation, juddering tape-deck clicks.Ī sense of dislocation hangs over the project, intensifying in the early-hours ruefulness of Sierra Leone and the discombobulated drug haze of Pilot Jones.
Beats run on after melodies recede, lonely guitars twang away in the margins, soundscapes overlap. The spaces between the hooks are of no less importance to Ocean, and on Channel Orange he opens them out and lets them breathe. One of the primary pleasures of Nostalgia, Ultra was how gorgeous melodies bloomed and faded in the mix. The rest of the album, however, feels too offbeat and diffuse to trouble the top end of the charts. Super Rich Kids, featuring Odd Future's obscenely talented 18-year-old rapper Earl Sweatshirt, is another. Sweet Life, a near-perfect distillation of every blissed-out summer jam from Stevie Wonder onwards, is one such moment. Only at two or three points in the album does it feel like Ocean is actively courting heavy radio play. Does Channel Orange bear this out? Not exactly. The message seemed clear: Ocean has cast off his underground ties and is stepping into the mainstream as a seriously bankable proposition.
In order to give British journalists an advance listen, a senior Def Jam exec flew over from LA with a copy of the album for two security-heavy playbacks earlier this month. Three tracks surfaced early, but robust efforts were made to keep the rest of Channel Orange under wraps until i ts digital release last week. Now, in sharp contrast to his gambit with Odd Future, Ocean is letting his old label release his first studio album the old-fashioned way.
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The mixtape, made free to download on his Tumblr blog, lit a fuse under his career, propelling Ocean to widespread critical acclaim and collaborations with Jay-Z and Kanye West. But in 2010 he met Odd Future, a gang of LA rap reprobates with a free-for-all approach to music distribution, and he decided to adopt their strategy. Ocean, who signed to hip-hop label Def Jam in 2009, had struggled to get his solo career off the ground and was writing songs for other artists, among them John Legend and Justin Bieber. E arly last year Frank Ocean put together a mixtape of his own music, Nostalgia, Ultra, and posted it online.
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