Album Of The Week: Blood Orange Cupid Deluxe

This is going to sound absolutely ridiculous, but Cupid Deluxe, Dev Hynes's second album as Blood Orange, reminds me of The Chronic. Hynes's lush and silky bedroom-pop is obviously light years removed, stylistically, from Dr. Dre's snarling cinematic act of West Coast rap world-creation. But it takes a certain form of vision to be both a consummate collaborator and a deeply personal and singular artist, an artist with a particular sound that you can recognize from a block away. The Chronic and Cupid Deluxe are both albums full of different voices -- voices that could, and do, hold down great albums of their own. Within the greater context of the albums, those voices get their own little starring moments, moments that establish a personality and take over the narrative for a verse at a time. But on both albums, those voices are supporting players, pieces within a whole. Both albums are rooted in a time and a place: The tense-but-euphoric Los Angeles that existed in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 riots and the Bloods/Crips truce for The Chronic, the cosmopolitan and retro-addled and cash-strapped and everything-socially-interconnected New York of this exact moment for Cupid Deluxe. And both albums owe their existences to the two brilliant, intuitive studio-rat artists who pulled all these voices together into sonically rich, referential, beautifully realized musical experiences.