Breaking R&B’s age-old Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, Frank Ocean came out this month not with a major statement, but with a story. Addressing speculation triggered by several songs from his debut album, Channel Orange, the 24-year-old singer took to Tumblr and resisted clear labels like “gay” or “bisexual” as he recounted his first love, a one-way emotional affair with a straight friend incapable of reciprocating. Like many of Ocean’s songs, the story was emotionally vivid and detail-rich, simultaneously poetic and plainspoken, and it’s mirrored by Channel Orange’s most moving track. On “Bad Religion,” the singer confides his heartbreak to a cab driver across a considerable language barrier. “This unrequited love, to me it’s nothing but a one-man cult,” he whimpers. “I could never make him love me.”
Unattainable love isn’t Ocean’s only concern on Channel Orange, though it’s a major one. In a casual croon that sometimes gives way to a strained falsetto, he narrates a series of J.D. Salinger-esque, first-person vignettes about spoiled socialites, desperate junkies, co-dependent pimps, and disillusioned romantics—disparate characters all linked by their failed efforts to forge meaningful connections. Channel Orange jumps from one big topic to the next, musing on addiction, privilege, history, spirituality, and anything else weighing on Ocean’s restless mind, and its arrangements bend accordingly, shifting from the sun-baked lounge of “Sweet Life” to the “Benny And The Jets” bop of “Super Rich Kids,” and eventually to the proggy electro-funk of the 10-minute album centerpiece “Pyramids.” Though those audacious swings could easily be jarring, Channel Orange is so arrestingly smooth that all of its unusually shaped pieces fit together as a seamless whole.