Freetown Sound is so sharply perforating in its look at being black and queer in 2016 that it nearly erases the snarky, funny, seedy, kid-obsessive sounds and visions that Devonté Hynes has put forth in the past as Lightspeed Champion, Test Icicles and even the first two Blood Orange albums of 2011 and 2013. Respectively, B-Orange’s Coastal Grooves and Cupid Deluxe were filled with naughty, silly love-and-sex songs and hook-filled electro chillwave pop that touched upon hip hop and old-school new-jack swing. Cute stuff; but hardly the stark, cutting display that is Hynes’ tremulous Freetown Sound travelogue about being a gay, black man in transition from his home in England to America (at 21, the age that his parents moved from separate homelands in Guyana and Sierra Leone to London).
With contributions from three generations of girl pop (Debbie Harry, Nelly Furtado, Carly Rae Jepsen), new-school NYC songwriters (Ian Isiah) and leftist journalists (Ta-Nehisi Coates), Hynes’ Blood Orange moves swiftly, wipes clean his chill-pop slate and goes for stark, ham-handed topicality hop (“Hands Up”), nattering jealous, confidence-shattering skronk-soul (“Better Than Me”) and loss as applied to menacingly atmospheric tones. That Hynes does this without losing his sense of pop and tunefulness is a sweet accomplishment.
On a song such as the heady, character-driven “Augustine,” he connects the dots between his parents’ physical journey, the manic faith of Christianity and his own tense moving through youth, America and #BlackLivesMatter issues. It’s devastating. And sweeter still.
—A.D. Amorosi
