Blood Orange: Freetown Sound review – ancestry explored in a collage of sounds

Billed as his most personal album yet, Freetown Sound explores the multi-faceted producer Dev Hynes’s ancestry, both cultural and musical. In his 20s, Hynes left London, and a series of indie bands, for New York and production work with Solange Knowles and Sky Ferreira; Hynes’s parents left Sierra Leone and Guyana for London at 21. Themes of exile, cultural confusion, Christianity and blackness permeate both generations, to which Hynes adds a hip-hop sensibility, sound collage, sexuality and#blacklivesmatter. Fortunately, on bravura cuts like EVP or the electronic ballad But You, Hynes has both funk and gossamer production skills, the better to unify this sprawling project. Elsewhere the patchwork of sounds don’t quite gel as heroically as you would have hoped.