Dev Hynes’s fifth studio album as Blood Orange opens with a series of unexpected musical juxtapositions. The first track, Look at You, starts out with softly sung vocals over a cushion of equally soft synthesiser chords, before stopping dead, then re-emerging as almost an entirely different song: harmonies over guitar chords strummed so slowly you can hear the plectrum hitting each individual string. The second, Thinking Clean, offers a piano over pattering hi-hats: there’s something anticipatory about it, like an intro that’s about to burst into life, but when it does – complete with dancefloor rhythm – the song swiftly falls apart. The piano becomes increasingly abstract, before everything gives way to scrabbling, apparently improvised cello.
It’s a lot to cram into six minutes, but anyone familiar with Blood Orange’s back catalogue might reasonably ask: what did you expect? Since he adopted the name, Hynes’s career has occasionally intersected with the mainstream, although never in a straightforward way. His biggest track, Champagne Coast, was belatedly hoisted to platinum status by a burst of TikTok virality, 14 years after release. As a producer and songwriter, his name has appeared in the credits of albums by major pop artists including Mariah Carey and Kylie Minogue, but never as a dependable hit-maker, more a signal that said artist is craving a hint of left-field cool. His albums exist in their own world, filled with unexpected musical jump-cuts, their variety indicated by the featured artists: Skepta and Debbie Harry, Nelly Furtado next to Yves Tumour, A$AP Rocky alongside Arca.
The results, while admirably eclectic, could often be too scattered for their own good. But Essex Honey feels like a noticeably different animal to its predecessors. The eclecticism is present and correct. This is an album on which a song called The Train (King’s Cross), which closely resembles old-fashioned Sarah Records indie pop, exists alongside one called Life, which with its snail’s pace funk, wah-wah guitar, falsetto vocals and bursts of sickly woodwind sounds not unlike something Prince might have made in the wee small hours. So, too, are those musical jump-cuts. Cæcilie Trier’s cello appears regularly, usually as tracks end, playing stuff that doesn’t sound interstitial so much as disruptive. There are moments when sounds suddenly emerge then vanish just as quickly, oddly disconnected to anything around them: a burst of keyboards before Somewhere in Between gets under way, a piano line in between Mind Loaded and Vivid Light that sounds as if it’s fallen off the breakdown of an old hardcore rave tune.
And yet, in marked contrast to previous Blood Orange albums, all the constituent elements are held together by tone and a sense of place. Its primary mood is a very British kind of late summer-into-autumn melancholy: there’s a hazy, sunlit quality to a lot of the sounds here – soft but warm synthesisers, electric piano and harmony vocals – and a chilly morning crispness about the undistorted electric guitar. The melodies are frequently gorgeous, but inescapably sad. Inspired by the death of Hynes’s mother, the lyrics evoke both Greater London’s urban sprawl – “Ilford is the place that I hold dear,” he sings on The Last of England – and its more pastoral surroundings, the latter a relief from “the broken light” of the city on Countryside.
It’s also an album on which memories provide a brief respite from looming tragedy. “Regressing back to times you know / Playing songs you forgot you owned,” Hynes sings on Westerberg, a song that duly borrows its chorus from the Replacements’ 1987 single Alex Chilton. Elsewhere, there are interpolations of tracks by Yo La Tengo and Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt: an extraordinarily lovely sample from 1998’s Sing to Me earns the Durutti Column a credit on The Field.
The other guests are the usual eclectic array – Caroline Polachek, Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates, Sudanese-Canadian singer-songwriter Mustafa, Guatemalan art-pop auteur Mabe Fratti among them – but they seldom feel like attention-grabbing star turns. There’s a heartbreaking moment when Lorde’s voice soars out during Mind Loaded, singing the phrase “everything means nothing to me” – an interpolation of the Elliott Smith song of the same name – and an impressively witty one during Vivid Light, when a line about writer’s block is delivered by novelist Zadie Smith. But for the most part, the guests stay in the background, out of the spotlight. They’re there in service to the songs and an atmosphere that continues to haunt you long after Essex Honey ends: grief marshalling a unique talent into music that’s desperately sad, but beautiful, a particularly resonant broadcast from Blood Orange’s irregular world.
This week Alexis listened to
Deftones – I Think About You All the Time
An early standout from Private Music: the Deftones’ shoegaze-y side turned up to 10, a heaving, emotive chorus.
