Angel's Pulse - Blood Orange: Review
is the long time project of British R&B singer and songwriter Devonte Hynes. Dev has released four records under the Blood Orange moniker met with varying degrees of critical success and announced the Angel's Pulse mixtape just days before its release and dropped it without a single.
Review By Lavender:
For a long time my opinion caught the ire of many Blood Orange fans when in 2013 his Cupid Deluxe record began to turn heads, but I wasn't convinced. Still to this day the record reads to me as an homage to 80s synth pop with a funky/R&B twist, but made by somebody who didn't really understand what made that music so good to begin with. The follow-up Freetown Sound was certainly an improvement but I still wasn't head over heels for the sound, especially given how much acclaim the record received upon release. It wasn't until Blood Orange's next release that I finally came around to his sound, as it transitioned into a much softer spoken and more intimate indie pop and funk infused style. Negro Swan wasn't perfect but it was far and away my favorite of Dev's releases and it led me to be excited for this mixtape, anticipating a release in the vein of Flume's Hi My Name Is Flume earlier this year with a tight tracklist of short songs that blended in and out of one another. But ultimately this is one of Angel's Pulses biggest weaknesses and its inconsistencies are always just around the corner.
The first major problem with the record is that there are a number of completely lifeless synth pop songs that always sound like they will be catchy but never are. The mixtape opens up with one of these tracks on I Wanna C U , the song Happiness shares this issue as well as a number of the shorter interlude style tracks here.
Usually when the record is at its best its because of some stellar features that make appearances to heighten the tracks. Dark & Handsome features a short but sweet feature from Toro Y Moi that adds a lot to an already great track. The gorgeous and spacey bouncing percussion is a great addition and Dev totally steals the show in the first half of the song with a great refrain. Take It Back is a really interesting posse cut that features Dev, Justine Skye, Arca and Joba. While the artists have drastically different styles I liked it quite a bit, Dev's singing is gorgeous while Arca's abstract falsetto is overpowering despite its quietness, and the song ends with a pretty cutthroat verse from Joba, of Brockhampton fame. All in all the track is one of the most interesting here and a great example of the versatility of Dev's style. Berlin is a wild surrealist pop tune that features vocals from Aaron Maine of Porches and while short it is one of the wildest experiments here.
The only other tracks here I really enjoyed were Dev's solo efforts. Benzo is an excellent track with punchy and groovy percussion and what is probably the best chorus on the album. This track embodies the lowkey funk inspired indie pop that made Negro Swan so good and I wish there was more of it here. Both Baby Florence and Tuesday Feeling are alright tracks that stay in the realm of lowkey for the most part but do it with good vocals and catchy instrumentals, particularly in the part of the former when the driving electronics are a great match with the airy singing.
And that's really all the highlights that there are here, the mixtape makes a number of mistakes in its runtime from disjointed and misplaced features on tracks like Seven Hours and Gold Teeth. To the disjointed mess that is Good For You and the strange closer Today which has some medoicre vocal mixing that puts a huge dent in the track.
I was hoping that Angel's Pulse would be a new classic of the mixtape era given how creative of a musician Dev Hynes is, yet how disappointed I've been with his studio albums as a whole. But Angel's Pulse is far too inconsistent, and makes a number of amateur mistakes that makes it feel rushed and lack authenticity. Obviously I'll be looking forward to what Dev does next with the Blood Orange name, hopefully in a proper full length form, but I don't really see anybody talking about Angel's Pulse a few years from now. 5.5/10
