Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra self-released

Frank Ocean has been detonating the R&B; tag on his music since he, with the collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (or OFWGKTA for the pacifists) started making blog splashes last summer. As he told Los Angeles Times writer Jeff Weiss in a recent interview, "I just think it's inaccurate when you're making music inspired by so many different things. I have a broad sonic palette and I mix everything together. It's just not the same thing." And his recent mixtape, released via the OFWGKTA Tumblr site, catalogs these evasive bombs that Ocean keeps in the shelter.

On the 14-track tape, he vacillates from the twee (the Coldplay interpolation "Strawberry Swing") to the classic (a revisionist cut of the Eagles' classic "Hotel California" now "American Wedding"), but one thing remains relatively constant: Frank Ocean is at his best when he is crooning. So he's using the primary means of R&B; decadence; however, by funneling it through his diverse and diverging palette, Ocean literalizes both his nostalgic impulses and the odd future of which he is a part.

It is from this polarity that the songs get their charge to cling to the cassette tape whose tracking starts the album. And he sustains the conceit throughout. The skit before the tightly wound bass line of "Songs for Women" tells the story of two girls arguing over what music should be played. They are asking for '90s R&B; throb Jodeci while a Radiohead song plays in the background. It seems like a sort of externalization of the interior battle raging in him. But the song that follows doesn't belie any hesitation in pursuing a pastiche. "Songs for Women" is a chirping, cheeky song about using his singing to seduce women. "We can kick in the living room, look through my whole vinyl collection/And you can teach me how to slow dance or something/And I'm a give you chills harmonizing to Otis, Isley, Marvin," he sings, nearing a falsetto of remembrance while at the same time sizing himself up to his contemporaries. "She stay blastin Trey and his songs all damn day long like she never heard of me." Unwilling to let his antiquarian impulses override, he seems to consider (with good reason) his hybridity as something that can push him past the relatively tame artists of contemporary crooners. "But you ain't listening, never. But if you were, you might fuck with it."

So he resorts to more overt vehicles to get his point across, as on "American Wedding." And its here that we might get a little peek into the psychology of the man shirking the foremost genre for love songs: He doesn't believe in love. At least not in the United States. While leaving the instrumental of the Eagles' twang as is, Ocean signs off: "but if you stay/girl if you stay/you'll probably leave later anyway/it's love made in the U.S.A." It's not a totally unexpected ending for a song told as a flashback.

At seven minutes it feels odd to call the song concise, but he manages to include everything from the discoloration on his finger from a ring to what his teenage bride wrote her thesis on, and all with time for the guitar solo. And it is really this impeccable storytelling that gets this song to stick together and to the inside of your ears. You humor his lifting of MGMT's "Electric Feel" just to hear where he goes from his starting point: "I've been meaning to fuck you in the garden."

Overtly unabashed, he still seems to be the gloss on a decidedly unpolished collective. While leader Tyler the Creator eats a cockroach and hangs himself in the video for his first single "Yonkers," and second banana Earl Sweatshirt pulls out his teeth and drinks a cocktail of pills, Ballentine, and cough syrup, the most transgressive Ocean gets is to say that he doesn't believe our country's flag is on the moon, his telling a woozy story about a bender he went on with a would-be dental student he met at Coachella (she was there for Z Trip, he for Jay Z) on the patina shimmer of "Novacane."

No doubt Ocean has sublimated all the surface schizophrenia of OFWGKTA into his music, and to great effect. And the album certainly does a lot to toss off the at times asphyxiating pillow of genre tags that journalists like to rest their heads on, but he can't stray too far from his polished warble. See the first minute of "There Will Be Tears": before the handclaps and the thundering bass hit he is flat over a hyperactive 808. Not until his voice stretches out, filling out vertically with his dynamic range and horizontally with his subtle shifts in tone, does he hit his stride.

And on the album's first proper song, the Coldplay revamp "Strawberry Swing," there is so much atmosphere you almost melt into it, and he spreads you over an apocalyptic swan song. "I've loved the good times here" is the refrain he calls before an alarm clock wakes him up. Nostalgia, Ultra is quite a convincing argument to stick around and hear what Ocean puts together after he gets out of bed.