Freetown Sound

Freetown Sound stands concurrently as a deeply personal work and a striking representation of the struggles present in today’s society.

Blood Orange moves swiftly, wipes clean his chill-pop slate and goes for stark, ham-handed topicality hop and loss as applied to menacingly atmospheric tones. That Hynes does this without losing his sense of pop and tunefulness is a sweet accomplishment. [No. 134, p.52]

It’s melodically strong enough, and bursting with so many ideas that it feels incredibly timeless: futuristic and classic all at once.

What results is an album to live with, and to live inside: engrossing and necessary.

Freetown Sound finds Hynes at the peak of his powers, mixing his best songwriting and production yet to powerful, purposeful effect.

Freetown resonates with everyone sagging under the weight of systemic oppression.

It is Hynes' ability to use such a variety of guest artists to complement, rather than overpower, his own work that is major factor in Freetown Sound's victory. When coupled with a powerful message and masterful vocal and instrumental arrangements, the result is Dev Hynes best work under any of his musical guises.

It’s a collection of unsightly surveillances expressed in a magnificent manner, and the work of a man more than capable of out-creating himself.

Sprawling, ambitious and politically conscious. [Sep 2016, p.102]

It may be a touch overlong and that relentlessly 80s production won’t be for everyone’s ears, but this is a triumph.

Freetown Sound is a clapback, a healing song, a historical re-embodiment of the (infinite number of) (also) black experience(s) contained within the vantage of a single individual.

[A] lovely but searing new album that weaves 2016 racial, sexual and political tension into an album of immaculate, Prince-inspired funk and R&B.

If Hynes had truly wanted to create an album about black identity as opposed to his own identity, he would have included the powerful ‘Sandra’s Smile’ and focused on the matter across all 17 tracks. He would have made a record dedicated to togetherness rather than individuality and it would have been equally excellent. Instead it becomes an underdeveloped aspect of what is otherwise an expertly tailored and politically-charged work of pop.

The hallmarks of Blood Orange’s sound are all here--breathy male/female vocal interplay, rare groove rhythms, jazzy sax, gliding slap bass, honeyed falsetto melodies and flirty spoken word--but channelled into a reassuring, comfortable space that brings together pop’s supposed polarities of accessibility and specificity. Somewhere in there, Freetown Sound finds its own beautiful sweet spot.

With Freetown Sound, he’s made something bold, challenging, uncompromising and overlong--an album, like the man who made it, that’s the sum of its parts and then some.

There's some blurring over 17 tracks, but as a whole piece, Freetown Sound is a record with unusually sharp focus. [Aug 2016, p.90]

This isn’t just glassy-eyed ambition--Hynes seems to have deliberately made this his blurriest effort to date, a blending of his chosen genres and ideas in a disorienting collage.

Dev Hynes' work--populist, experimental, healing, agitating, straightforward, multi-layered--demonstrates this unfailingly. Prince's radical pop spirit lives on in many artists. But none are channeling it more fully, or artfully.

One of the most sincere sonic statements of the year.

No one idea ever outstays its welcome and there’s no denying the passion behind Hynes’ work and the fascinating insights that come with these 17 tracks. It’s an album that feels haphazard but one that is luckily more hit than miss, and an album that ultimately needs to be experienced.

Admittedly, sometimes the album’s ambition does threaten to trip itself up--there’s a few too many half-sketched ideas crammed in, as opposed to fully formed songs; a bit of ruthless editing might have whittled down the running time to a more manageable 50 minutes or so. However, there’s certainly more highlight than filler contained in Freetown Sound and it is, ultimately, an album that deserves to be heard.

As it stands, it’s a flawed love-letter to the ‘80s, to the people who just want to dance, to the people who feel marginalized, to the people who feel oppressed.

The record is so personal that the only one able to understand every layer is Hynes himself. As a result, Freetown Sound can come across as weighty, indecipherable chaos to some. But for anyone who can relate to him on some level, it's hard not to be in awe of a man as complicated as Devonté Hynes being able to compose such an insightful, personal experience.

If it's a little too impressionistic to last the 17-track distance, then Freetown Sound still seduces. [Aug 2016, p.73]

Freetown Sound certainly has the sprawl, hyperactivity, and potential of a personal masterwork, but its master is more conduit and conductor than confessor.

On bravura cuts like EVP or the electronic ballad But You, Hynes has both funk and gossamer production skills, the better to unify this sprawling project. Elsewhere the patchwork of sounds don’t quite gel as heroically as you would have hoped.

At an hour in length, though, and spewing at the seams with new sounds and concepts, Freetown Sound is more a vessel for Dev Hynes’ production prowess than Blood Orange’s flag in the sand.

Devonté Hynes’ latest outing as Blood Orange takes the soft-soul stylings of 2013’s Cupid Deluxe and mashes them together with African voices and percussion, saxophones and vox populi samples to create a sonic collage that seeks to marry the vision of Marvin Gaye with the methods of Frank Zappa. That’s a considerable ambition, and unsurprisingly it falls well short much of the time.