The Singles Jukebox

It’s been a while since he had the headline role round here, but the score’s consistent…

[Video][Website]
[7.25]

Adaora Ede: Ever since he started stemming out of the (mostly white) post-punk scene of Lightspeed Champion to start side-project Blood Orange, Dev Hynes has consistently succeeded in creating the most elaborate sounding soundscapes with the simplest of instrumentation. “Augustine” vocalizes so much in terms of Blackness, especially for me, as a child of simultaneously the Pan-African diaspora and the Black American experience. Even just watching the beginning of the music video where Hynes reclines on the trunk of a car whilst seamlessly hitting them folks, I empathize with his display of Carefree Queer Black Kid. However, the track itself is a whirlwind of poignance, beginning with a pseudo-slam poetic take of his parents’ migration from their native homelands of Sierra Leone and Guyana to live in London. The rest is melodically sung, as with much of Hynes’s drum machine-driven/layered vocal combo songs. The call to the historic African saint sounds religious in a way that I normally would not expect from a Black artist. Our church music has always been known for its upbeat elements. Maybe I’m being too dithyrambic in saying this but it feels almost as “Augustine” is not a spiritual, but a hymn for a people who have been depersonalized to the point where our music is forbidden from being too deeply burdened by our feelings.
[9]

Jonathan Bogart: It feels cheap to reduce such a heady blend of Christian devotion, queer sexuality, Afrocentrism, and lush synth orchestration to a Prince comparison, but the chronology of 2016 has left me with little choice. But where Prince, reared on funk, psych, and Minnesota Nice, was content to jam signifiers together using his own charisma as mortar, Dev Hynes comes out of more reticent literary traditions: the British tradition of hyperliterate synthpop — there’s a bit of Pet Shop Boys DNA in the muttered first verse — and the cosmopolitan New York art world, which likes to pretend that the art is more important than the artist. So he’s crafted a jewel of a song that will (probably) never get the masses heaving on the dance floor but should make him an indie darling for life. Classically educated gay men have been using out-of-context Augustine quotes as a form of pillow talk for centuries, but “Sero te amavi, et ecce intus eras” has rarely sounded more winsome.
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: Dev Hynes sounds like a kid who got to sneak into the music room to play the tune in his head he has been dying to play on the piano. He speaks, he croons, and he grieves like no one else is in the room. And listening to “Augustine” feels like I’m eavesdropping on the echoes of his voice from down the hall. I want to respect his personal space, but at the same time, I’m hoping he doesn’t shut the door completely.
[7]

Madeleine Lee: I like “Augustine” because it sounds like a summer afternoon sitting with the window open, letting time slip by; or like walking down the street at night, feet slapping down to the beat, while you occasionally glance over your shoulder to make sure no one’s following you because you really, really want to listen to this song.
[9]

Juana Giaimo: Blood Orange can’t find in “Augustine” the right music for his strong words, which unfortunately, pass unnoticed in a mess that lingers too long.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Producing Solange doesn’t mean singing like Solange. This meaningful wet neon puddle of a production with quotations — this is a first in a would-be pop crossover — from Confessions would signify if Dev Hynes treated it like a production instead of a demo, and this goes double for the drum program.
[6]

William John: Dev Hynes’s most successful work has placed women at the centre as vocal avatars. A Londoner in New York with a musical history he’s done well to repress, the lead single from his latest personal project is a thoughtful exposition of the precarious edge upon which an outsider sits while scrambling to grasp a sense of place. It’s a pertinent theme in a time where the very act of being Black and visible in America (or, indeed, anywhere) carries with it politics and danger. Regrettable, then, that such a tale is relayed in a voice so phlegmatic and with such absence of affectation it’s as though the singer has been stricken by torpor. The bones of an imperative anthem are present, but the delivery is misguidedly watery.
[5]

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The two figures mentioned in the song — St. Augustine and South African prophetess Nontetha Nkwenkwe — are the anchors of Hynes’s powerful cross-cultural message. The former, a man who found his faith in his thirties (“Late have I loved and chose to see”), is approached through a queer perspective (“Skin on his skin, A warmth that I can feel with him”) which is also connected to ideas about migration (the pursuit of a better world: physical, spiritual, ideological, emotional). The latter is given an anthemic coda, a reminder that her fight for unity and understanding is still alive. “Augustine” reflects on New York City, queerness, Trayvon Martin, and even Dev’s own family history as signifiers of freedom and dignity. It’s a message that needs to live and breathe in 2016. One that needs to fill every space in the conversation as possible. And with such an elegantly constructed track — from the brilliant choice of drum-machine to the reverbed piano chords and Ava Raiin’s chants — it’ll eventually find its way in. That chorus contains today’s true Gospel.
[8]