Blonde is a beautiful and intricately detailed patchwork of emotions and experiences by a guy who has realized he is going to die. Or maybe that part is his favourite because when he was a kid death seemed a million miles down the road. On follow-up song Alabama, he spits out several declarative verses that conclude with a series of questions: “What could I do to know you better than I do now? What can I do to love you more than I do now?”

“When I feel what I feel/sometimes it’s hard to tell you so,” Ocean croons.

The first time we hear Ocean’s voice is on a slow-motion cover of The Isley Brothers’ At Your Best (You Are Love), a more classic and romantic take on the dynamics of communication compared with Tillmans’ icy banger.

It’s not exactly a game-changer of a release strategy, but it echoes a cultural critique in his music.Įndless begins and ends with Wolfgang Tillmans’ Device Control, a deadpan synth-pop song about the way mobile devices allow us to blur the line “between still and motion.” The German artist goes on to list off vapid brandspeak (“life-casting”) in a ridiculous electroclash satire of the ways technology is marketed to consumers. The 28-year-old’s roll-out says something about what he values: highly covetable and collectable hard copies. The second, Blonde, came out two days later in two formats with two titles: digitally as Blonde via iTunes, and physically as Blond via a CD inserted into a high-art magazine called Boys Don’t Cry that is available at pop-up shops in select cities. It is available as a single continuous stream via subscription-only Apple Music. The first, Endles s, is a visual album of mostly ambient music set to an experimental film of Ocean constructing a spiral staircase in a sparse studio.

Meanwhile, Kanye West billed The Life Of Pablo as a work-in-progress and has since revised it multiple times following release.įrank Ocean has done what many prolific artists threaten but rarely do: he pulled a Prince and released two albums back-to-back. This year, Beyoncé delivered a “visual album” in Lemonade, structuring a non-linear cinematic narrative around a linear tracklisting. Where digital has given artists the greatest leeway is in the album roll-out. An album is still a series of songs that form single body of work and only rarely do musicians flaunt commercially acceptable run-times. The shift from finite music formats to digital appeared to open a new world of possibilities for the album, but for the most part its parameters haven’t changed that much.

Blonde frank ocean album review