Channel Orange

Seventeen tracks in about fifty-five minutes, and the subtractive test bites more than once. Thinkin Bout You must open the songs, the plain statement of a longing the record will circle. Super Rich Kids, Crack Rock and Lost are three views of getting high from three classes; Pyramids is the centre of gravity; Bad Religion is the confession the record turns on, and Forrest Gump the answer, a love song to a man in the open. The test bites at the edges. Fertilizer is a jingle-length fragment, Not Just Money a spoken aside that states what Sweet Life and Super Rich Kids show, White a pleasant guitar interlude, and Monks the slackest of the full songs. Start and End are a frame more than a necessity. Five of seventeen tracks could go with little lost, and that holds the figure.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, in two parts, and both hold. First: wealth and its pleasures numb more than they satisfy, and the rich kid and the crack user are getting high for the same reason; Super Rich Kids has “nothing but loose ends”, and Sweet Life asks why see the world when you have “got the beach”. Second, and deeper: a love that cannot be returned, for a man, confessed inside a genre built for a man’s seduction of a woman. Bad Religion confides it to a cab driver and names unrequited love “a bad religion”; Forrest Gump says it plainly, “You run my mind”. The falsetto lifts where the words admit. The social half is stated as attitude more than shown, and the love is sketched in two songs, not held across the record.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation comes often and is warm. Bad Religion is the summit: an organ and strings under a voice climbing from confession into a falsetto cry, grief and transport in one breath. Pyramids rises twice, at the break where ancient Egypt dissolves into the modern club, and at its close, a long guitar solo over a slow synthesised groove. Thinkin Bout You lifts at its falsetto hook; Pink Matter turns stately and strange, André 3000 at his most inward; Forrest Gump ends the songs on a shy, high tenderness; Sierra Leone floats. The rest has charm or force more than height: Super Rich Kids is drily cool, Crack Rock bleak, Monks level, and the short pieces do not rise. Six of twelve songs reach height, the highest very high.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Myth is built once and evoked a few times. Pyramids builds: Cleopatra, a queen who is stolen and falls, becomes across the cut a dancer at the Pyramid club kept by the singer, the same woman in two ages, and the archetype of the fallen queen is load-bearing for ten minutes and stays particular, a car, a motel, a working night. Elsewhere it is evoked. Forrest Gump borrows an American figure of the innocent who runs, and the love song takes its shape from him; Bad Religion makes love a faith and a cab a confessional; Pink Matter reaches for creation and the mind as a cosmos. The other songs are character sketches whose people stay particular without becoming more. The myth is carried by one track, not by the record, and that holds the figure.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is rich and plain: the soul of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Prince, the R&B of the 1990s and 2000s, and Ocean’s own nostalgia,ULTRA (2011) and songs written for others. The turn is of voice and subject. A male R&B singer on a major label sings a love that cannot be returned, and one that is returned, to men, and posts a letter saying so days before release, inside a genre and a milieu built on male seduction of women; the songs become character sketches, not seductions, and one runs to ten minutes in two movements. The stake was real and personal: the career and the audience. The sound looks back to the 1970s, the sketch and the interlude had precedent in hip-hop albums, and the turn is in the singer’s stance more than in the music’s language.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and some of the knowledge goes. The record moves like channels found and left, a summer flicked through: a rich kid’s afternoon, a crack house, Egypt, a cab. The drift is part of the meaning, a consciousness that cannot settle on one life because the one it wants is withheld. The two-part form of Pyramids is knowledge, a myth and its present in one track, and the voice’s turns into falsetto carry what the words will not finish. The sequence is counted here, once: the confession of Bad Religion comes late, after the sketches have shown the world it must be spoken in, and Forrest Gump answers it before the end. The drift is also a looseness: most songs would stand alone or in another order, and the short pieces are a container rather than an instrument.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence is short, fourteen years, and the figure is a forecast. The return is real: the record is still streamed whole, and its character songs yield on close listening, the courier of Lost, the narrator who is also the pimp of Pyramids, the rich kids’ boredom as despair. Bad Religion’s ambiguity, whether the religion is the love or the faith that forbids it, stays open. The production has details that surface on return, the transitions inside Pyramids, the textures under Pink Matter. Much of the record gives what it has on first hearing; the interludes do not renew; and part of the return is to its maker, whose next record and long silences have drawn listeners back to this one. The forecast is good, not deep.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The field is R&B and hip-hop of its decade. The intrinsic force: the record moved R&B’s voice from seduction to confession and observation, joined the singer-songwriter’s intimacy and the character sketch to contemporary R&B, and showed that a male R&B singer could sing of love for a man to a mass public on a major label. That reorganised what the genre’s first person could say more than how the music was made. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album, and a common credit, shared with The Weeknd’s and Miguel’s records of the same years, for shaping the inward, genre-blurring R&B of the 2010s and opening the genre to queer artists. The movement was shared, and the reach that runs through Blonde (2016) is not this record’s.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Survival is weighed over fourteen years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the album survives as released and has stayed in print and on every streaming service. Presence is continuous and wide for its age: Thinkin Bout You and Bad Religion are still heard far beyond critics, and the record is placed high whenever its decade is counted. Popularity is credited as presence, not proof. The fabric is mostly unfixed: warm keyboards and guitar in a 1970s idiom date slowly. Some surface is of 2012, the brand names of a rich kid’s afternoon and a few production textures. Fourteen years is the whole of the evidence; the width of the presence is what lifts the figure as far as it goes, and the span is what holds it.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing on the best tracks. Ocean’s voice is the instrument: a low, conversational baritone that turns to falsetto at the point of feeling, phrasing that runs behind the beat, and a control of breath that makes Bad Religion’s climb land. The production, chiefly Ocean and Malay, keeps the sound warm and close, with real organ, strings and guitar, and Pyramids’ transition and closing groove are arranged as composition. The guests are placed with care: Earl Sweatshirt’s dry verse, André 3000’s slowed inwardness, John Mayer’s guitar. The faults fall on a share of the record: the short pieces are thin, Monks is muddy, some songs rest on one texture throughout, and the voice’s mumble sometimes blurs where it should cut.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs most of the record: a summer of plenty in which everyone is getting high to escape a want that plenty does not reach, and the singer’s want is a person he cannot have. The two most distant elements obey it. Crack Rock, an addict seen with police indifference, and Super Rich Kids, the boredom of the wealthy, are the same escape from two ends of one city; Pyramids, an Egyptian queen and a modern dancer, and Forrest Gump, an innocent’s love, are both a love that cannot be kept. The range is wide: soul ballad, hip-hop verse, a ten-minute suite, a love song, a jam. The short pieces and Monks obey only loosely, the frame is light, and the law is felt through the range rather than binding it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in a voice that observes and wants. Love and sexuality are held, and the record’s centre is one love withheld. Class is held at both ends, the rich kids and the addict, with money in Sweet Life and Not Just Money. Drugs as the common escape run through four songs. The state appears as the police of Crack Rock; religion as Bad Religion’s faith and the cab driver’s prayer; myth as Egypt; the city as Los Angeles and its suburbs. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve: most orders are present as one sketch each, joined by attitude more than by structure, and labour, the natural order and history beyond myth are thin. Many orders, lightly held.

Score: 7.6 / 10