Not pictured: the dashed dreams of hip-hop heads…

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Brad Shoup: I get that it’s in our critical charter to flip at any scrap of André and Antwan, and sure enough, their twinned straining against the strictures of the Jeff-Buckley-dines-at-Macaroni Grill production really is the closest thing to a high point.
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Alfred Soto: A shrewd thing for Ocean to ask for help reanimating what was already a sappy plaint, and if it goes pop crossover (yeah right) I’ll call Dre and Boi shrewd too. But a Wikipedia footnote is what I suspect this track will remain.
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Andy Hutchins: This song got the first set of André 3000 and Big Boi verses since 2010 and its most notable moment is the part where Frank Ocean calls a vagina “cotton candy Majin Buu.” And the second half of the song, with the slightly more interesting guitar stabs, a relatively perfunctory Antwan verse (“Smoke through a chim-i-ney” is the best bit), a rare André verse more interesting for its wordplay (“Butter knife, what a life, anyway/I’m building y’all a clock — Stop, what am I, Hemingway?” has an internal rhyme for very little reason followed by a six-syllable end rhyme) than its content (Chris Brown got something similar two years ago, and André’s last line there is telling), an unimaginably bad guitar solo (fun game: try describing it to one of your friends who is unfamiliar with it) is just a good end to a post-coital lullaby masquerading misapplied as the coda to a boring baby-making tune.
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Patrick St. Michel: “Whoa, Dragonball Z, sweet!” That was my reaction when I first heard Frank Ocean sing about Majin Buu on the original “Pink Matter,” a moment that made the Toonami-loving teenager inside of me giddy because, hey, DBZ! Thing is, that excitement wasn’t brought about by the actual music but just from a reference I got. The song itself drags a bit, the André 3000 verse good but not great, the highlight being the violins lurking in the back. But, for awhile, an anime reference made me think “Pink Matter” was better than it was because I totally didn’t see that cut-away happening. The remix pulls a similar trick, albeit for a cooler set — Outkast are back together here, remember them? They were great! Yet this doesn’t sound like Outkast at all — and the fact André 3000 didn’t sound thrilled Big Boi even appeared on this drives that home — and the new verse’s focus on doing the “grossest” is out of place here and hurts whatever momentum “Pink Matter” had.
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Crystal Leww: The parts don’t all fit together seamlessly (Big Boi’s verse in particular sticks out in the middle of the song), but every single part sounds really beautiful in its own way. Frank is heartbreakingly beautiful, Big Boi is, as usual, a deft rapper; words just sound right when they’re coming out of his mouth, and André delivers a verse at rapid-fire rate just as gut-wrenching as Frank’s. 
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Iain Mew: It worked as part of developing a mood over the course of channel ORANGE, but doesn’t carry enough weight to strike out alone. Grimes’ “Nightmusic” comes to mind as something we covered with the same problem, although in this case it’s a little more excusable as it isn’t a single but an attention grabbing remix with an Outkast not-quite-reunion as its selling point. Having two fine verses at the end instead of one just makes me more impatient to get past Frank’s part.
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Anthony Easton: The way he sings peaches and mangoes, or the way he sings pleasure, the weird stoner philosophy of aliens and purple skies, the strings straight from “Theme from A Summer Place” that escape into a kind of onomatopoeic graveyard of shouting and moaning — even the tension between Ocean’s falsetto and the rough slow roughness of André or Big Boi is rewarding. But all of the details move into yet another discussion of female sexuality — where they are thick girls or hos or disembodied metaphors. The music of this, the funk lick guitars lapping those sumptuous strings, the electronic and percussion — all of it has potential, and the lyrics just become more heteronormative play-acting, better written and better performed than most, and more innovative, but what begins strong ends disappointing. 
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The interesting/frustrating thing about the album version of “Pink Matter” is how it morphs into an André 3000 cut upon the man’s arrival, indulging all his squawking method-role guitar noodling. For the remix, Frank steps to the side and creates a makeshift Outkast “reunion,” another courteous move that he doesn’t really need to pull. (It is a status symbol, of course — this is Outkast, Official ATLiens, Diamond Status Grammy Winners, Best Duo To Maybe Still Be Alive, Maybe, Maybe?!) The seductive trippiness of the song feels fuller with Big Boi’s new verse, offering three different takes on the allure of “pink matter.” Dre’s sidewinded by romance; Big’s thinking about how to showcase his bravado; as before, Frank’s marvellously overthinking his way into world-spanning tangents, challenging you to try and crack the code. It’s all very, very alluring.
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Ramzi Awn: The sprawling levels on Ocean’s vocals make it hard to control the volume, but it’s worth it.  The “Pink Matter” remix is a functional exercise in moody minimalism.  By the second listen and the “good at being bad, bad at being good” coos at the end, it’s clear that the old-school blend is working.
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Katherine St Asaph: The ponderously druggy mood works elsewhere on channel ORANGE, where Ocean’s engaged in topics other than his immediate lay; here, though, it’s more a cautionary tale about screwing under the influence of weed or philosophy: you can’t get sexuality through all this bullshit. (A criticism Big Boi will no doubt appreciate.)
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Sabina Tang: In the original construction of “Pink Matter” (the most visceral and haunting song on an album that is not replete with gut-clenching moments), Frank Ocean builds a head of tense sadness with strings — swells and dips and sustained tremolos that nearly unravel into dissonance — in a way that reminds me, of all things, of Patrick Wolf’s widescreen emotionalism. The resolving funk guitar lick, when it arrives, is a slow-burning paroxysm worthy of Prince, and all André has to do thereafter is carry the ball home: wax sincerely regretful about cuddling and how she deserved a better man. Big Boi’s loverman murmur is charming in isolation, but in context he aims too light. The additional verse only serves to diffuse Ocean’s melancholic intensity before André gets his turn. On the other hand, it feels churlish to dock points, given that the track disintegrates anyway with the untuned ending chant; and I can’t tell what the purported remix has otherwise changed. 
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