Blood Orange
Freetown Sound
[Domino Recording Co.]
Another stealth release – albeit only a week earlier than scheduled – Freetown Sound is the third album from Dev Hynes under his current sobriquet, Blood Orange. His primary focus as Blood Orange has been R&B and funk, but while it doesn’t lose sight of those roots, Freetown Sound is an ever-mixing bricolage of different genres. Simultaneously dark, airy, and painfully honest, Hynes integrates samples of Ta-Nehisi Coates speeches and black feminist poetry with the same ease as he glides through the smooth, pained melodies of songs like But You and Best to You. Modulating his own immense range to suit the goal of each track, Hynes gorgeously complements the talents of each of his collaborators – an array of female vocalists including Debbie Harry and Carly Rae Jespen – creating something new and beautifully, inextricably fused with each verse.
It’s a project both politically powerful and deeply personal – half protest album, half personal diary. Its messages, as Hynes has remarked, have to be on his mind as a queer, black man. And if saying them is political, than all the better for us and it graces us with such an emotionally-charged rendering of both the present moment, and the past that has led to it. An album dedicated to the society’s marginalised, Hynes’s powerful lyrics and transcendent sound resonate as he fluidly plays with tropes, melodic structures and field recordings, the themes of the album blending together as inseparably as in his life.
Words: Madeleine Calvi
Like this? Try these:
Prince – Sign ‘O’ The Times
ANOHNI – Hopelessness
Stevie Wonder – Innervisions
