While Blood Orange is ostensibly a solo moniker for pop polymath Dev Hynes – his second after Lightspeed Champion’s mopey indie-pop – it has always represented more of a collective. Like 2016’s excellent Freetown Sound – a 17-track fusion of the personal and political, assisted by Carly Rae Jepsen and Debbie Harry – the sprawling Negro Swan, his fourth as Blood Orange, carries the loose-fitting feel of a mixtape. Throughout, guest vocalists bubble to the surface, occasionally interspersed with snatches of found sounds, or the ominous swirl of a police siren. Its mercurial nature is both a blessing and a curse.
Like other recent albums keen to shed light on the black experience (Hynes has said Negro Swan is about “black depression … and the ongoing anxieties of queer/people of colour”), it’s anchored by a narrator in the shape of Pose producer and transgender rights activist Janet Mock. Unlike, say, Lemonade or A Seat at the Table, however, Mock’s interludes often reiterate themes communicated far better in the songs themselves, most obviously on album highlight Charcoal Baby, which, in one line (“No one wants to be the odd one out”), makes Mock’s foreshadowing interlude Family feel redundant.
Hynes is a consistently generous bandleader, however, and has no qualms with being overshadowed. His thin vocal is used as a base colour throughout, with the broader strokes coming from Ian Isiah on the sparse gospel of Holy Will, and Georgia Anne Muldrow, who injects raw soul into the spoken-word poetry of Runnin’. Elsewhere, he weaves hip-hop and jazz on Hope, Tei Shi’s airy vocals riding a glistening beat that manages to make rap’s least relaxed-sounding rapper, Puff Daddy, feel at ease. On Chewing Gum, meanwhile, Hynes does what he does best, concocting a gauzy summer haze that centres around a languid, one-line chorus. It’s packed with detail – the gorgeous, folk-tinged guitar figure that underpins the A$AP Rocky verse, for example – but falls apart towards the end when a heavily Auto-Tuned Project Pat muddies its clarity.
Ultimately, that’s the main problem here; just when you settle into Negro Swan’s groove, it changes tack, leaving you feeling weirdly unmoored from it and, worse, emotionally disconnected.
