Realign your expectations, and what gradually emerges is a record of enigmatic beauty, intoxicating depth and intense emotion.
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Where Stevie Wonder was his debut’s key influence, Blonde seems to have more in common with records such as Big Star’s Third or Radiohead’s Kid A, where texture and experimentation are given free rein.
Blonde is the sound of an artist cashing the critical cheques he’s accrued with Channel Orange and taking the rare opportunity to create a record that answers only to its maker’s own vision. Those of a devilish mindset might be tempted to conclude that after finally finishing his much-hyped masterpiece, Ocean mistakenly deleted it from his laptop the night before launch, and had to frantically cobble together what he could from memory at 3am using an acoustic guitar and FX pedal.īut such cynicism would be misplaced. White Ferrari wanders aimlessly across a line cribbed from the Beatles’ Here, There and Everywhere before a passage of semi-singing: Ocean appears to have stopped trying altogether. Good Guy consists of nothing but wobbly organ chords played underneath hurried memories of a hookup in a New York gay bar – the whole thing collapses after barely a minute. On first listen, Blonde appears to be a collection of loose sketches waiting to be hammered into shape by a no-nonsense producer. Instead they’re deployed in a manner akin to session musicians or low-key production hands: Beyoncé’s role on Pink + White is reduced to outro backing vocals, which demonstrates admirable chutzpah if nothing else. Yet aside from André 3000’s centre-stage turn on Solo (Reprise), you’d barely know most of them were here.
Photograph: Claudio Bresciani/Scanpixīlonde boasts collaborators of a variety and star quality unparallelled by anything else you might hear in 2016 – Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, James Blake, Amber Coffman and Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. (More than half of the 17 tracks here are without drums.) The lyrics are elliptical and fragmented, touching on adolescence and consumerism, identity and eroticism, yet lacking the sturdy narratives found on, say, Pyramids or Swim Good.
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The tone is muted and introspective, full of spectral guitar and lacking not just hefty beats but any kind of percussion at all. Identifiable bangers of the kind Ocean has rattled off either for others or himself – most consistently on his 2011 mixtape Nostalgia Ultra – are conspicuous by their absence. Whatever you may think about Blonde, it’s undeniably one of the most baffling, contrary and intriguing records put out by a major pop star – not just this year, but any year. If you felt disoriented before you’d even pressed play, then that wasn’t the half of it. It came with sleeve artwork on which the title is spelled differently (Blond), a physical edition with a slightly altered tracklist and, if you ventured to one of the four pop-up shops in London, Chicago, LA and New York on the night of its release, a glossy magazine called Boys Don’t Cry (Blonde’s working title) that featured, among other things, a poem by Kanye West about a McDonald’s cheeseburger forming a band with a milkshake. And guess what? That wasn’t what people were expecting either. Less than 48 hours after Endless dropped, Ocean’s long-delayed second studio album finally did arrive, in the form of Blonde.
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