There is a song for everybody on Channel: ORANGE. From his droll, bored-sounding rap (complimented perfectly by Earl Sweat’s sludgy assonant flow) on “Super Rich Kids,” to his lofty desperate cries on “Bad Religion,” to the trippy harmonies that scold a childish grown woman on “Pilot Jones” - there is no emotion Frank Ocean’s voice can’t express.

“Thinking About You” was a godsend in this respect. Frank Ocean’s writing has done so much for revitalizing the super-clean, over-produced, modern R&B sound that infects pop radio today. The album covers such a wide range of emotions, genres, and styles. It’s a street symphony, which is beautiful, but life in these streets is chaotic, not symphonic. It feels too rational, too well-ordered at times for the chaotic subject matter it claims to know. It seems at times as if all the rappers are studying this gangster as if he were a specimen in a petri dish, or a better metaphor: as if they were enlightened beings looking down from heaven sympathetically, at the doomed mortals below. The album has this feeling of cold scientific distance. It was during this polishing though, that I fear a bit of the pretense and didacticism typical of concept albums managed to creep in. The band workshopped every verse for the album multiple times, and threw out hundreds of drafts in order to create potent and well-balanced lyrical content.

The verses ask big existential questions: “What’s beyond time?” and “When you return to the essence/ What is it back to the essence of?” concepts that are usually too big to fit into a 16-bar rhyming pattern. The album has a somber, contemplative vibe.

Ranking frank ocean albums