Problem for me is, I don’t really care for it. Maybe it was the added Young Thug feature on Ocean’s Beats 1 radio show, Blonded, but it always had a feeling of prestige involved. I’ve always felt the most popular song from Endless (again, can you have a “most popular song” from what is essentially an unreleased album?) was Slide On Me. It is that raw feel that keeps you coming back to Endless again and again. The quiet power in the vocals lays fantastically well next to a simple and effective piece of guitar work, that feels ripped straight from a live studio session. Higgs is a song that feels the most pained to perform across the album, and seems to be the little brother of Seigfried on Blonde, another delicate and ethereal ballad that appears right towards the end of a Frank Ocean album. It captures the essence of what I think Frank Ocean (and lets be honest, we’re never going to properly find out) was trying to achieve with Endless, and leads fantastically into the albums truest slow-burner, Higgs.
A little extra roar here and there have been inserted for its CD release, but at its core this is a beautiful and dreamy piece of production that has the ability to feel like true escapism. Which is strange in a way, as Rushes To (originally part of Rushes, I know, stick with me) on its own is a beautiful choice. As a standalone track it loses a lot of its appeal. I also enjoyed Florida a lot, lot more when it was the outro to Sideways as I originally thought. The tone of the vocals in particular feel completely out of place. A project with so many unconventional tracks in length is bound to disappoint from time to time, and Hublots has extremely large portions that make the track as a whole feel unnecessary. Not that Endless doesn’t steer into forgettable territory from time to time.
Commes Des Garcons doesn’t even last a minute on the official release, and yet the dramatic/humourous lyrics included by Ocean and the slow burning hum of effortless production in the background make what could have easily been a throwaway track memorable. The formers simple, repetitive piano loops hit harder on every listen, and to couple with nectar-like vocals from Sampha is just spoiling us. Where past and future Frank Ocean projects were interspersed with brief, mostly forgettable interludes, Endless puts a lot of faith in the strength of its short but sweet impacts to fill the 35 minute playtime.Īlabama and Commes Des Garcons are the two best examples of this. Eleven tracks on the 19 song tracklist don’t even hit the two-minute barrier, and yet undoubtedly some of these songs are the true highlights of the entire project. What gives Endless a very distinct feel, for better or worse, is the use of many tracks that are particularly and deliberately short. While it doesn’t have the emotional swell of poignant lyricism that Rushes possesses later on in proceedings, it contains such a naturally depressive feel that makes the words involved near-impossible not to relate to in some way. The skeletal approach used to skirt over the directionless vocals from Frank makes for a gut punch of a track. The next to appear in the tracklist, Wither, is my favourite of its type. This ballad-like effort isn’t the only of its kind on Endless. One of the most vocally powerful performances on Endless, it now is spread with lavish and precise string instrumentation, that drag Ocean’s performance out of the recordings even further. Gone are the fairly terrible intro and outro efforts from Wolfgang Tillmans and his “Device Control”, and Endless now truly begins with Ocean’s haunting cover of The Isley Brothers/Aaliyah song (At Your Best) You Are Love, a song that began as a self-released cover on Tumblr way back when in 2015. So, of course, it was on the Internet in seconds, with a crisp, fresh feel, and (perhaps most relieving of all), a clearly defined tracklist. Endless, having been dispatched a (large) number of weeks late than expected, has arrived at doorsteps worldwide. Having settled for lo-fi, muddy recordings ripped from an Apple livestream since August of 2016, it did feel, Black Friday vinyl sale or not, that we were destined never to hear Endless in it’s full and fleshed out form. Only Frank Ocean could have people waiting for an album to be officially released, close to two full years since its reveal.