In what is possibly the grandest fulfillment to date of the post-modern album release, Frank Ocean has, for the past week, confounded the Twittering masses with “Endless,” a new collection of music that defies easy categorization and begs one big question: what is it, exactly?
It’s ostensibly a visual album, but its hypnotic, black-and-white shots of woodworking figures are a world away from the colorful, shapeshifting images of the year’s other biggest musical film event, Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” It might be a way to fulfill his contract with Def Jam and free up the main event, which we now know as “Blonde,” for independent release. It could be a collection of demos for songs that didn’t make the “Blonde” cut — many of the songs here are hazy and spare, and Alex G, the patron saint of Bandcamp bedroom pop, plays guitar on several tracks.
“Endless” could be all of those things, really, but it’s clear Ocean put care into whatever it is. Beyond the visuals — with the obvious metaphor of “building” — the songs blur together into a near-seamless swirl of pastel-colored sleepiness, not in the “ready for bed” sense but in the “just waking up” one.
For all its short-lived and occasionally unfinished-sounding tracks, it’s a cohesive collection — more so than the year’s other “work-in-progress” event, Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” — and, at the same time, it’s stylistically divergent. Ocean raps more than ever on tracks like “U-N-I-T-Y” and “Sideways,” and he obscures his singing more, too, with overdubs and reverb. There are moments of complete ambience, and there are pop hooks on “Commes des Garcons” and “Slide on Me,” as indelible as any he’s penned.
Ocean has always been a sharp lyricist, but whereas some of his best pre-“Endless” tracks leaned toward narrative — the dental student-porn star dichotomy of “Novacane,” the Nile-to-Nevada time travel of “Pyramids” — he’s loaded these new songs with effervescent abstraction.
“You cut your teeth on sheets in Paris,” he sings in “Rushes.” It’s one of the album’s defining lines — apparently contradictory, obviously loaded with meaning and resistant to parsing. The song and its sequel, “Rushes To,” make for the album’s high water mark, two relationship-failure ballads that Ocean makes painfully beautiful in his execution.
“Endless” is absolutely a pleasant late-summer listen. Importantly, it’s obviously a personal one.
The florid but obtuse and referential lyrics, the bizarre film component, the sonic exploration swaddled in bedroom demo fidelity — these things all point toward this being an album made by and for Frank Ocean, one that he decided to share with us.
The album as a personal statement is nothing new, but it’s still a brave — and rare — move for a musician of Ocean’s caliber to put out an album so far removed from consumer expectations. In the internet era, we’ve come to expect two things from our favorite artists that perhaps we shouldn’t: constant new music and surprise or out-of-the-box releases that function as major pop cultural events. Four years after “Channel Orange,” Ocean gave us “Endless,” subverted both those expectations and cleared the ground for “Blonde,” the bombshell everyone expected of one of the greatest artists of his generation. “Endless” seems like a gift. It’s a damn good one.
