Speaking to NME ahead of its release, De Souza said she was keen to explore a wealth of sonic influences on ‘Any Shape You Take’. “I get really excited about using all different types of tones,” she said, “mostly because that’s how my brain feels. It’s not one dimensional, there are lots of ups and downs so I think I just try to reflect that in music. “I didn’t know what it would be until we were in the thick of it. Then it all made sense, the way we built the songs felt very in line with my life up until that point. I was in a bad place when we were recording but also a really good place at the same time.ĭe Souza’s forthcoming US tour kicks off next Sunday (November 14) in Nashville, with a show supported by Allie set to go down at the Mercy Lounge. She’ll follow it up straight after with two gigs in Asheville – one alongside Ex Gold and the other supported by Truth Club – before hitting the New Brookland Tavern in West Columbia on Wednesday November 17.Īfter a few months off, the run will pick back up in January with shows in Charlotte, Richmond, Washington, Brooklyn, Boston, Burlington, Camden and Philadelphia. Tickets for all of them are available from De Souza’s website.Before it was recognized as a sprawling masterpiece, Frank Ocean’s debut album channel ORANGE was pigeonholed as an overhyped album about coming out of the closet. Prompted by a tumblr note published the week of the album release, that reaction had little to do with the music. The album itself was more concerned with rich dimensions of love, loss and longing than rote sexuality, but Ocean’s sexuality utterly dominated how people talked about the album.
It certainly wasn’t a PR disaster-the album eventually went platinum-but for Frank, it had to be maddening: somehow a tiny blog post, an aside, really, eclipsed the grand vision that the post was meant to enrich.
It was if he had built a bridge to an island entirely of his own design and all people talked about was the bridge’s suspension cables. Ocean has mostly existed in suspended animation in the interim between channel ORANGE and Blonde, leaving his fortress of solitude for the occasional feature or broadcasting his thoughts from within its dungeons via oblique tumblr dispatches. His absence from public life has been so absolute that it has spawned memes, conspiracy theories and fan fiction about him being seen IRL. Blonde is just as evasive-Ocean obscures his face on the album cover-but it’s his most resonant work yet, constantly pushing past profound alienation to connect, however fleetingly, to something, someone. Throughout the album, Ocean flits in and out of memories and relationships, replacing the set pieces of channel ORANGE with slipstream vignettes.
0 kommentar(er)
