CD Reviews

Frank Ocean | Nostalgia, Ultra

Self-released (2011)

By DAN WEISS | July 27, 2011

3.0 Stars

If anyone's earned the right to bitch about the limitations of being slotted "R&B," it's Frank Ocean. The 24-year-old has a membership in the world's most paid-attention-to rap group (OFWGKTA); credits on Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, and (soon) Jay-Z/Kanye songs, and, finally, a little album he defiantly uploaded to his Tumblr earlier this year — wherein he walks past a Radiohead sample to wax pro-choice, pro-porn, pro-marriage, and pro-"singing songs to get at women," over MGMT, Coldplay, and all seven minutes of "Hotel California." It just happens to be one of the year's best releases, in any genre. The analogue here would be Cody ChesnuTT, who shares Ocean's smartass lo-fi ambition and one-cult-hit status: ChesnuTT's Roots team-up "The Seed" and Ocean's wildfire-spreading "Novacane." Original beats from Tricky Stewart and Midi Mafia underscore Ocean's gray-area R&B, in which, with cinematic vividness, his drug-addict broad possesses both a "rack like wow" and a "brain like Berkeley." This is one of those fabled records that's too good to exist . . . and it doesn't, technically, in any corporeal form. A week before a planned July 26 re-jigger via Def Jam that presumably would've cut all the copyrighted gold, his publicist confirmed "he's still working on it and may just want to focus on new tracks instead." So Google — don't walk — to obtain the original 192k batch of music from March instead of waiting for Nostalgia, LITE, Ocean's good-for-nothing label's attempt to market and re-package Ultra, officially, without all those expensive samples. It's supposedly winnowed down to seven excellent tracks you can pay for, versus an album-of-the-year candidate you can cop free legally (for now). The finished versions of "Acura Integurl" and "Whip Appeal" should justify the wait, however longer that may be, but you need original cuts of "American Wedding," "Nature Feels," and "Strawberry Swing." Collect them all.

Frank Ocean | Channel Orange
Since the ’80s, when R&B began to lean more heavily on the candid bling-and-booty-centric tropes championed by its plain-speaking hip-hop cousins, the music’s subtlety, nuance, and imagination have faded.
Trans Am | What Day Is It Tonight? Trans Am Live, 1993 - 2008
Trans Am are distillers of guilty pleasures, mixing fat AOR riffs with sleazy electronic accents and a propulsive attitude typically reserved for arcade soundtracks. What Day Is It Tonight? covers the DC-area band’s 20-year history with high-quality, high-energy live cuts taken from their many tours.
Various Artists | Where the Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965 - 1968
More than three years in the making, the most recent installment of Rhino's legendary archival garage-rock series offers an amazingly comprehensive excavation of an absurdly fertile scene.
Various Artists | Nippon Girls: Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1966–1970
Girl-group records are great and everything, yet the countless compilations out there were becoming a little hit-or-miss until 2005, when the great Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found box set finally gave this diverse genre a proper taxonomy.
Various Artists | Casual Victim Pile: Austin 2010
The notion that regional musical flavors exist independently in American cities is quickly becoming an archaic truism, seeing as how the world really is a stage these days, at least in the digital sense.
Bearstronaut | Broken Handclaps
There's a distinct absence of wildlife or astronauts on Lowell electronica quartet Bearstronaut's latest release.
Avi Buffalo | Avi Buffalo
Look, I get it: the last thing we need right now is yet another band who can be described as “sun-baked,” “reverb-soaked,” or even just “psychedelic.” But Avi Buffalo (I know! An animal name to boot!) are worth your attention for a few reasons.
Eli ''Paperboy'' Reed | Come and Get It!
Local boy Eli "Paperboy" Reed isn't so local anymore.
Review: Brandon Flowers | Flamingo
Brandon Flowers has gone on record saying he brought the songs on Flamingo to his fellow bandmates for the next Killers album and was given the brush-off.
Review: Kevin Dunn | No Great Lost: Songs 1979–1985
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Review: Crocodiles | Sleep Forever
With remarkable swiftness, Crocodiles tick off all the key characteristics of a band in the thriving lo-fi indie/punk/garage scene.
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Topics: CD Reviews , Music, R&B, Cody Chesnutt, More

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