His voice, the connective tissue between the two projects, unaccompanied and so emotive, surprises over and over in its versatility. In the drumless drift of the music, the only thing left to hold on to is Frank’s voice, which can’t go unsung anymore. But so many of these 100-something minutes pass without drums to ground them. Not that there aren’t clear hits (the first three tracks of Blonde and “Nights,” even as they breathe in and breathe out, are radio fits). Endless and (maybe to a lesser extent) Blonde meander and mumble, their most sweeping moments fade away, get interrupted, phase in and out of the song that names them. He was storytelling and constructing a world of heroes, even if the location he was singing from deconstructed those figures and their origins. It was a procession of scenes, names, direct addresses.

There was a narrative hold to much of channel ORANGE’s lyricism. The visual album also signaled the lived-in noise that flows through the twin-peaking releases: high and low not in love and making love meaning something to you (“Nikes”), but it’s no-thing, it’s no-thing (“Self Control”). Like an Arca mixtape, the most gripping beat yet (“Commes De Garçons”) will vanish into something else after a few sweet seconds. The first two songs on Endless aren’t even Frank Ocean songs, and the rest blur together with an anti-programmatic sort of dream sequencing. His response to the crisis-ordinary is to take his time, to ask us to be patient. A live stream bridging to a life stream - deliberate, graceful, probably holy? You binge-watched an empty room. You had to be a little possessed to step into Frank’s workshop throughout the month, like: You at least believe in portals. It’s a release so intentional and fitting that I wonder how it’ll adapt to winter listens, how it’ll remain a sustained portal to this season’s sentimentality.īlonde is of instances, of stretches and yawns, creativity in recreation, invisible labor, a time-lapse collapsed into one space: the Endless workshop, a breathing room. Blonde is not of an instant, even if somehow all four years of waiting and working seem to have taken place in the last weeks of August, at summer’s end, right now. “That’s a pretty fuckin’ fast four years flew by.”Ĭhannel ORANGE was elevated to an instant’s classic by the urgency of Frank’s self-disclosure as an Event and the hooky immediacy of its songwriting. Now, hearing that missing voice speaking at the edges of the channels, I think that maybe he had been there the whole time, just like we never said goodbye. It’s Frank’s life, which is poured into his songwriting with such clarity it’s like magic (work, smoke) how it blurs. A hall with a hundred doors, each of them with a clearer world beyond: a garden of light and dollars, a glossy magazine cover, some spiral stairwell under construction off the highway, the McDonald’s drive-thru, the club, a beach before leaves fall on it. Muttered words, birdsong, things falling apart, studio space clatter, voicemails, windblown interviews. There’s so much life in Endless and Blonde and there in between.

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