Frank Ocean - Channel Orange (2012)

the interludes are some of my favorite things on the album. "fertilizer," "the end," even the mayer thing is a nice little golden slumber. nice on their own and really hold the album together.

i actually realized today that as someone who bought the early itunes download of this that i still haven't heard the secret song at the end w/ tyler

it's not that great. I don't have it and don't really think of it as part of the album tho. bonus track for a reason.

but yeah, I leave "Fertilizer" and the Mayer thing in my running order

pilot jones is gorgeous

"too many bottles of this wine we can't pronounce"
this song rules

Also "Thinking Bout You" is from about a year ago.. I'm surprised more people here hadn't heard it before. But yeah, it also rules.. as does "Sweet Life." As a whole, the album sounds great after becoming familiar with the songs. The first couple listens didn't do all that much for me.

Yeah, Channel Orange sounds really good on the surface and it's easy to like immediately, but then you dig deeper and it becomes this whole other thing.

Agreed - it gets better on repeated listens. "Super Rich Kids" is the first one that really caught my ear. The whole thing gives me a classic-period Stevie Wonder vibe - though more for the moody deep cuts than the uptempo hits.

Thought he was very good...then the SNL performance took it to whole nother level...absolutely transcendent...don't know why but 'Thinking Bout You' reminded me of Jeff Buckley...prolly the big reverbed guitars...

I don't hear much Stevie Wonder on the record tbh but I do hear Jeff Buckley.

Sweet Life is the most Wonderish song imo.

I have dreams that Jeff Buckley would of gone onto do a soul album ala Lewis Taylor/Southern soul vibe...

i hear a lot of Omarion and Ryan Leslie in his voice, Wonder and Buckley are too far out of his league to even mention

dude is a very good singer with a very reedy instrument; he could be a lot less nasal but he would probably lose his non-falsetto high range

I dunno...maybe not a record but I thought the SNL performance was revelatory...

The falsetto was stunning...

His voice doesn't remind me of Wonder's - I'm thinking more of his music on more understated tracks like "Creepin" or "Too Shy To Say" or "Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" off of FFF.

yes, FFF is def the Stevie record this reminds me most of

so this is really rev & jordan's aoty, huh? finally got around to listening to it this week and so far it hasn't hit me. i don't think he's a bad singer at all and what i liked best about it was actually the lyrics, think he's clearly a pretty fantastic writer. but, the production and songwriting never pulled me in. kept waiting for a song to really knock me out but each one just sort of passed by. also, i wouldn't be surprised to find out a lot of it had passed thru the smeezingtons' hands at some point? i like bruno mars but fsr expected this to be more n/l soundwise, like compared to take care, which i loved in spite of lyrics/voice, just through sheer force of production... anyways i'm going to keep listening, i'm at least intrigued, had a lot of thoughts and feelings about my adolescence while listening to this album

if you have enough thoughts and feelings about adolescence things "sort of passing by" become romanticised i guess

I think a lot of people are bringing misplaced conceptions of what the album is supposed to sound like. "Pyramids" aside, he isn't trying to dazzle with next level sonics, but rather create something more cozy, lived-in, maybe even a little bit trad, even beyond the obvious nods to Stevie, Elton, and Bootsy. It all sounds great, but innovative, no. Really, the album is more about the lyrics, tunes, and especially his vocal nuances. His phrasing is fucking incredible and adds so much depth to the songs.

Btw, there isn't any Smeezingtons involvement with the record, most of it was co-produced by Ocean and Malay, who did work on Trunk Muzik and other stuff. Pharrell and Om'mas Keith of Sa-Ra did some work on it, too.

And I won't lie, a lot of my love for this record simply stems from how easily I identify with Frank. Like Brainwasher said upthread, just hearing a male singer sing "boy" or "him" in a love song after half-identifying with male r&b singers or misidentifying with female r&b singers for so long is so fucking edifying it's ridiculous. Also, his navigation of sexual ambiguity speaks much more to my experience as a queer man than all the super gay homo stuff out there (although obv I love that stuff too). Any "thoughts and feelings" I have about this album are much more connected to who I am now than who I was as an adolescent.

It's really more of a neo-soul album than anything.

cosign that post

yeah... it's not supposed to be a terius album or something. not that it aspires to be anything less than great, but its reaches those heights by being working within the context of music that is more traditionalist, more comfort food.

tbh I've been "queering" texts -- musical or otherwise -- for so many years that I can longer distinguish between male and female personal pronouns.

and damn I was ready to love Ocean singing to a "him" but I can't quite make the leap with this particular record.

it's about atmosphere and feel too, and that's one of the things i love about it. sometimes i'll just open the blinds a bit and lay on my bed and listen to this. i understand how that sort of classification means much of the album will pass some people by but, there are stretches on the album (super rich kids -> pilot jones -> crack rock or lost -> white -> monks) where the songs sort of bleed into each other and fade into a soft glow. i think it really works, and well, the songs are actually there too imo

One thing I've noticed about this record: generally when he sings about sex it's with a woman and when he sings about love it's with a man.

YES

great point

yeah, at least explicitly. i think there are some oblique reference to sex in the songs that are (or that i read to be) about men. i.e. "you were my first time / a new feel" in "thinking about you"

and vice versa ("but your love ain't free no more"). the separation isn't absolute, but it's definitely noticable.

yeah i agree

I just had a mildly horrifying thought re: phrasing - Can you imagine how much less affecting these songs would be if instead of FO, it was my stronger-voiced mans Trey going all vibrato-monster on them?

or Terius going high-pitched vibrato-femme on'em

yeah this album is still slaying me. probably top-3 album of the year for me.

Like flopson, I only got around to really listening to this last week. Hasn't knocked me out on early listens either, but I can certainly see that there's something there that I just haven't gotten yet. Agreed that the words are more interesting than the music, though beyond "Thinking About You," none of the lyrics sound that queer to me.

Really wish I found the music more captivating, though. I'm fairly certain that I like Frank Ocean as a person much better than Drake or Abel Tesfaye, but so far I'm still reaching for their records over Ocean's.

Ocean is a much, much better vocalist than either of them. This is another one of those occasions where I get mad running up against people who want r&b to be first and foremost about sonic innovations, I think.

was listening to Marvin again recently

the songs sort of bleed into each other and fade into a soft glow

i feel like this is a thing that way too many people are going for lately (both in making and in praising). too much vague fadey hazey mood around

I'm fairly certain that I like Frank Ocean as a person much better than Drake or Abel Tesfaye, but so far I'm still reaching for their records over Ocean's.

luckily there are people making great r&b right now who are none of these people!

love love love this album today/this morning right now at 4 am.

and like, whatever, lex, this is a damn good neosoul album. it is not vague fadey hazey mood stuff a la Drake and Weeknd which you normally decry.

j0rdan is talking about loose songwriting and fluid movement between tracks - more like the sequencing and structure of Baduizm or Mama's Gun or VooDoo. (not necessarily saying this is on that level but that is what he meant by "bleed into each other and fade into a soft glow" - i often forget when tracks end and begin while listening to early Erykah and most of D'Angelo. and it's not because it's bad music or because it's hazy or vague.

the vague fadey hazey stuff you decry is usually hazy and vague sonically and lyrically - the weeknd & drake - and I don't love either of them, although i enjoy them both slightly more than you do - and whatever channelORANGE is, it isn't that.

and soft glow would never describe drake or the weeknd anyway.

i mean, look, i'm totally fine with you not liking FO or channelORANGE but if we're gonna mount critiques can we not do it on the grounds that it somehow shares DNA or other vital characteristics with the weeknd and drake? because other than the fact that all three share a non-hip hop critical audience and p4k audience, Frank doesn't have much in common with the other two besides badly conceived trendpieces from a few years back that declared them musical saviours or PBR&B or whatever and that is admittedly stupid, but it's not what's going on on this album.

saying "this thing has the same flaws as those things" doesn't mean i'm equating them - they're not the same thing, and i wouldn't really include drake in the overly fadey hazey criticism anyway (he has a knack for a hook, or basic-level catchiness anyway, that the other two don't)

i still think that voodoo is a good comparison for this structurally.... it's maybe if there was like some imaginary LP that bridged brown sugar and voodoo

o_O fuck does this album have to do with d'angelo, y'all are tripping

No one is saying its as good as. We are saying it is more like D'Angelo than The Weeknd. It's built around grooves that flow into each other that nevertheless form distinct songs. One of its attractions is an overall 'vibe'. Etc.

Hazy and vague can be a bad thing in the case of the Weeknd (if you think so) while still being a good thing about channel ORANGE. I mean, again hazy and vague are not the words I would use but whatever aesthetic decision we are talking about functions differently for Frank than it does for these other folks IMO and I assume Jordan's and they function similarly to how they do on D'Angelo records or Erykah records hence the repeated 'this is more of a Neo-Soul album' statements from me and rev and J0rdan

I dunno, I think CO is a lot more song-driven and less groove-oriented than Voodoo. xp

It works in a way that's closer to, say, Mama's Gun. Not as sui generis in its construction as Voodoo, with the songs as more discrete entities with quite differing styles from one another but still playing off of the surrounding songs.