Every night in New York City, around 4,000 young people face the darkness without a home. Many are teens. A disproportionate amount are gay, lesbian, or transgender, shunned by their families or the world at large. Some close their eyes under trees in Central Park. Some sell sex downtown. Others go underground and lean their heads on the dulled metal of subway trains traveling along the ACE line, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom of Queens. According to "Netherland", a harrowing New Yorker story from last year that chronicled the city's young, homeless, LGBT underground, the ACE is known to some lodgers as "Uncle Ace's house." This comforting nickname provides the title and inspiration for "Uncle Ace", a key track from singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes' second album as Blood Orange.
Starring the kind of battered-but-resilient souls who stroll through the city in the dead of night, the impressionistic song has Hynes switching between a low and high singing voice, subtly accentuating the androgynous characters within. It's mysterious, desperate, empathetic. "Not like the other girls," he offers, possibly taking the purview of a woman who feels like a man, or vice versa. Hynes shines a careful light onto his vulnerable subjects, inhabiting their travails with grace, all while a disco pulse and smoky saxophones harken back to his beloved 80s, when Times Square was a misfit's home away from home. The outcasts that live inside of "Uncle Ace" are Hynes' people. As the London-raised, New York-based 27-year-old has hopped from project to project and style to style over the last 10 years, he's maintained the air of an outsider. With Cupid Deluxe, he channels those vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting—an album that tenderly details various heartaches through the language of longing.
Growing up, Hynes was bullied and beaten up enough to end up in the hospital on more than one occasion. He first directed his angst into Test Icicles' spazzed punk as a teen before moving onto Morrissey-style tragic confessionals with Lightspeed Champion. His first album as Blood Orange, 2011's Coastal Grooves, traded in Lightspeed's orchestral folk-pop for slick new wave and funk, streamlining his once-unwieldy songwriting in the process. But it wasn't until he co-wrote and produced two songs from last year—Solange's "Losing You" and Sky Ferreira's "Everything Is Embarrassing"—that he found the most suitable vessel for his melancholic odes to expired love. Both tracks are propelled by springing 80s beats that are tugged down by minor chords and wounded lyrics; the upbeat drums suggest good times past, making the reality-check vocals hit that much harder. Given the blaring nature of modern pop, the subtlety of these hollowed-out songs was genuinely refreshing; not just "indie" for the sake of it, but affectingly human.
Cupid Deluxe largely (and winningly) follows the formula set forth by those modest hits, while bringing them forth on a full-length scale. Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, synths. But this is hardly a solo act. In fact, one of the record's greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests. Not only does each member of the Cupid Deluxe team seem to fully understand the overarching wistfulness of the whole, but many of them show off heretofore unheard facets of their talent. While Hynes' girlfriend and Friends frontwoman Samantha Urbani and Kindness leader Adam Bainbridge exhibited tentative skills with their respective groups' debut albums last year, they make the most of their spotlights here; Urbani often sounds like she's mimicking the sultry chirpiness of an absent Solange, but her clear chemistry with Hynes makes the substitution more than adequate.
Meanwhile, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth and Chairlift's Caroline Polachek have never sounded more soulful. Typically ominous rap producer Clams Casino contributes light, skittering drums to the Longstreth showcase "No Right Thing", which could fit snugly into any Vampire Weekend setlist. Even the set's two rap cameos, from Queens' Despot and London's Skepta, are anything but your usual in-and-out 16-bar guest shots—both MCs are given plenty of space to weave tales that are tactile and intimate, while Hynes' vocals take on a more ghostly role on the tracks' edges. And while the inclusion of a bubble-funk remake of Britpop curio Mansun's pompously overwrought 2000 single "I Can Only Disappoint U" sounds almost comically random on paper, Hynes' Fat Boys scratches and Urbani's featherlight vocals make it fit into the album's loose after-hours milieu. Such awareness and selflessness consistently pays off, making all involved sound that much better.
Especially Hynes, who's in complete control. Each drum machine snap, snippet of errant barroom chatter, Malcolm McLaren sample, and moist-eyed, questioning chorus snaps together to form a midtempo mixtape for the high-school dance you never had. The first-blush glances. The slowed mirrorball twinkle. The push and pull. "Baby are we on the line/ Tell me baby are you mine?" he sings, knowing full well that if you have to ask the question, you probably know the answer.
Like many Manhattan iconoclasts before him, Hynes holds director Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary of NYC gay and transgender ball culture, Paris Is Burning, very dear. While everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga has taken inspiration from these events—one of the few safe havens for participants to revel in their true selves without having to worry about the judging eyes of society—they often focus on their more outrageous or empowering aspects (see: "Vogue"). But Dev Hynes' music is more suited to the film's beautiful and wrenching quiet moments, like when transgender model Octavia Saint Laurent confesses her desire to "be somebody" or is seen worshipping cut-outs of supermodels taped to the walls of her bedroom. The message comes full-circle on the Michael Jackson demo of a closing ballad, "Time Will Tell", which repurposes some of Hynes' own lines while a refrain of "and it keeps on running back" underlines the repetition. Gay, straight, man, woman, black, white, or anywhere in between: Heartbreak is real. It won't stop.
