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Ncsu expandrive tutorial10/13/2023 A live stream bridging to a life stream - deliberate, graceful, probably holy? You binge-watched an empty room. His response to the crisis-ordinary is to take his time, to ask us to be patient. 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. Like an Arca mixtape, the most gripping beat yet (“Commes De Garçons”) will vanish into something else after a few sweet seconds. 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”). There was a narrative hold to much of channel ORANGE’s lyricism. It was a procession of scenes, names, direct addresses. He was storytelling and constructing a world of heroes, even if the location he was singing from deconstructed those figures and their origins. 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. 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). But so many of these 100-something minutes pass without drums to ground them. 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. His voice, the connective tissue between the two projects, unaccompanied and so emotive, surprises over and over in its versatility. Swelling harmonies and ad libs, deconstructed rounds (“Alabama,” whoa), spoken word, gospel, pop, rock, rap. Everything surrounds it, every feature (except for the jarring Andre verse to show just how solo both alum otherwise feel) is an instrument, a suggestion.
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