Ocean’s ‘Nostalgia, Ultra’ a heartfelt, albeit downtrodden, debut

Nostalgia, Ultra

Frank Ocean

Self-released

Rocks like: Drake with more… Nostalgia, Ultra

Frank Ocean

Self-released

Rocks like: Drake with more “swag”

A

Frank Ocean is no stranger to love songs — in fact, the New Orleans-born singer is credited with writing romantic numbers for the likes of John Legend and even Justin Bieber. But unlike Bieber, Ocean doesn’t exactly hail from a family-friendly musical background.

Ocean, whose real name is Christopher “Lonny” Breaux, is the R&B component of the hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA), a group of teenage skaters with a reputation for unrelentingly raw lyrics. Ocean’s markedly cleaner songs are in many ways motivated by the same sentiments, but from a completely different perspective.

The opening interlude, employing a ’90s nostalgia that permeates the album, is named after the classic video game “Street Fighter.” More somberly, the first full-length track, “Strawberry Swing,” features Ocean delivering an apocalyptic story of atomic bombs and a dying earth with the simple refrain, “I’ve loved the good times here / and I will miss our good times here.” The song ends with what sounds like an alarm clock waking Ocean from a perceived dream.

The singer delivers trademark smoothness throughout the album. On “Novacane,” he croons about smoking weed with a porn star at Coachella, and on “Songs 4 Women,” he unabashedly admits to using his singing ability to get girls, while at the same time lamenting a woman who ignores his music for more conventional R&B singers like Drake or Trey Songz.

The most candid moment on the album surfaces in “There Will Be Tears,” in which Ocean tells of his nonexistent relationship with his father. In addition to being incredibly heartfelt, the song highlights a common thread between Ocean and the boys of Odd Future: absent dads. As 16-year-old member Earl Sweatshirt raps on his song “Couch,” “But something was always missing like six digits / Lucky seven probably poppa.”

It’s only fitting that an artist like Ocean belongs to a group like Odd Future. The crew of hyper-intelligent skate kids is often lumped in a genre with horror-core artists or even Insane Clown Posse. But the collective contends that its music can’t simply be put in a box. This fits perfectly for Ocean, whose association with the group makes assigning it a single genre that much harder.