Photo

Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, on the receiving end of a 5-star review from Alexis Petridis this week:

“Ocean shifts away from the latterday model of the male R&B singer as a kind of Auto-Tuned solipsist, ever ready to elicit sympathy for terrible lot of the multi-platinum superstar. Ocean’s sound looks further back – you catch hints of early-70s Stevie Wonder in the melodies and the preponderance of electric piano – but there’s nothing reverential about his approach. In a formulaic era, his production is impressively idiosyncratic, heavy on hazy electronics and cavernous, dubby reverb, and packed with weird touches: the melodies never quite pan out as you expect them to, while the backing shifts and changes unpredicatably.”

Read the whole review here.