Lana Del Rey - Norman F***ing Rockwell (sixth album) (1 Viewer)

Same. We're also getting the new Ezra Furman and some archive prime-era Cabaret Voltaire on Friday but I shall be giving Lana priority, of course.
 
Not feeling the love for "Cinnamon Girl" at all. I struggle to get through it. The title track is gorgeous, as is Mariner's Apartment Complex and Hope Is A Dangerous Thing. A lot of the melodies are fairly flat and never quite take off. For the first time ever, I'm finding a new Lana album a bit of a let down.
 
i love that video. and it's my favourite song so far but considering it's a cover i'm still not very hopeful. i thought the double video singles were dull as death.
 
4/5 stars from Slant Magazine:

Released just seven days apart, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell and Taylor Swift’s Lover share a primary collaborator—songwriter and producer Jack Antonoff—as well as oblique references to Kanye West, with whom both women have had messy public feuds. Each album likewise represents a course correction in the trajectory of its creator’s career, but if Swift’s album is a sharp turn back to more listener-friendly pop fare, Del Rey seems as disinterested as ever in courting contemporary trends.

After two albums that found Del Rey doubling back to the hip-hop-inflected baroque pop of her 2012 breakthrough, Born to Die, Norman Fucking Rockwell picks up where 2014’s sludgy, more roots-oriented Ultraviolence left off. The singer has aptly described the new album as a “mood record,” a heady collection of psych-rock and piano dirges that pour into each other and rarely shift tempo from track to track. “Mariners Apartment Complex,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Venice Bitch” amble along to hazy, psychedelic grooves, closer in spirit, if not style, to Del Rey’s breakout hit “Video Games” than the hooky singles that have followed.

Norman Rockwell’s vision of America defined much of the 20th century, with illustrations that often depicted a sentimental—some might say naïve—interpretation of American life. Despite its parodic title, though, Del Rey’s latest doesn’t so much subvert an idealistic notion of the American dream as perform a postmortem of it. On “Venice Bitch,” which is rife with references to quintessential American icons like Robert Frost, Del Rey pines for a world that had already coughed its last gasp by the time she was born. And she wistfully delivers a eulogy for both pop culture and the planet itself on the apocalyptic “The Greatest”: “The culture is lit and if this is it, I had a ball,” she laments with a shrug.

Doom and gloom permeate almost every aspect of Del Rey’s depiction of modern life. “If you hold me without hurting me, you’ll be the first who ever did,” she sings on “Cinnamon Girl,” a shattering admission eclipsed only by her disaffected portrayal of love in the age of geosocial networking on “Happiness Is a Butterfly”: “If he’s a serial killer then what’s the worst that could happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” Norman Fucking Rockwell closes with the stunning, pointedly titled “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It,” in which Del Rey invokes the final sleepless nights of Sylvia Plath and answers critiques of millennial ennui with the soft bigotry of low expectations: “Don’t ask if I’m happy/You know that I’m not/But at best I can say I’m not sad.”

Enlisting one of pop’s premier producers for what is easily Del Rey’s least commercial album to date might seem ironic. But Antonoff has proven capable of pushing other female artists into the darkest corners of their respective pop worlds, and he allows Del Rey to explore her most indulgent inclinations here. She disappears for long stretches at a time throughout the nine-and-a-half-minute “Venice Bitch,” leaving room for Antonoff’s trippy guitar feedback and liquid psychedelic effects to ooze and distort like a fading memory before the whole thing evaporates in a puff of nostalgia. The album’s most viable single, “Fuck It I Love You,” is peppered with expletives, building to a frothy head of cerebral lust that begs comparisons to Ani DiFranco’s similarly paradoxical “Untouchable Face.”

Though it isn’t quite as long as 2017’s Lust for Life, the 68-minute Norman Fucking Rockwellcan have a soporific effect. Many of the album’s songs are stripped down to little more than piano and vocal, eschewing the towering hooks and ornamental flourishes of Antonoff’s work with Lorde and Swift. Even a lush cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time”—which, sonically, might have fit better on Born to Die or 2015’s Honeymoon—is faithful to both the album’s downbeat, sadcore-meets-surf-rock aesthetic and the SoCal band’s own musical legacy, to which Del Rey’s sound is at least partly indebted.

Distilled to their barest elements, the songs on this album reveal themselves not to be hollow vessels for vapid self-absorption, but frank assessments of the psychic effects of a world spiraling into chaos. Del Rey has long cemented her status as a cult icon in the vein of a Tori Amos or Fiona Apple, whose influence on the title track is unmistakable, and she inspires the kind of fanaticism that often leaves her detractors perplexed. With Norman Fucking Rockwell, however, she’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute.
 
She’s already announced her next album White Hot Forever for next year :D :disco:
 
Taylor WHO?

On a related note, she never seemed happier or more bubbly than her more recent interviews:

 
It's you, all the roads lead to you
Everything I want and do
All the things that I say
It's true, all the roads lead to you
Like the 405 I drive through
Every night and every day :(

I DON’T WANT TO LIVE ANYMORE :(:(:(:disco:
 
I really like "Doin' Time" but now that I had a few run throughs it really needs to be a bonus track or something where it doesn't break up the MOOD so severely. It's not just the tempo , but the production is so much more polished/contemporary than everything else it is kind of distracting.

Anyway PRELIMINARY RATE:

08 Norman Fucking Rockwell
09 Mariner Apartment Complex
09 Venice Bitch
09 Fuck it I Love You
08 Doin' Time
09 Love Song
10 Cinnamon Girl
08 How to Disappear
10 California
08 The Next Best American Record (10 for demo)
06 The Greatest
08 Bartender
09 Happiness is a Butterfly
07 Hope is...

It feels like sort of a marriage between Ultraviolence and Honeymoon. It is definitely a change of course from L4L. "Cinnamon Girl" is straight out of BTD. Too early of course to rank it amongst her other albums.
 
I read someone else talk about the leak version of The Next Best American Record. WHERE CAN I HEAR THAT?
 
I suppose it’ll serve me right for still buying CDs like it’s 1995 but I’m a bit disappointed by the crappy jewel case this comes in, not to mention that nonsensical blue vertical stripe on the back and all the asterisking of the oh-so-shocking vulgarities

I shall rip it to iTunes, give it a new cover and throw the CD in the bin :disco:
 
Last edited:
Dark Carnival said:
I read someone else talk about the leak version of The Next Best American Record. WHERE CAN I HEAR THAT?
Click to expand...


It was meant for L4L. Lyrics/chorus are different. The tone of the demo is more melancholy to me, which suits it more I think. The word is they shot the video for the demo when it was intended to be on the last album, and used it for “White Mustang” instead when it was scrapped. Someone dubbed the NBAR over it and it is seamless.
 
That is amazing! The video and the melancholy elevate it even more. It’s really an a amazing track either way. Wow.
 
LOON RATE

10 Norman Fucking Rockwell
10 Mariner's Apartment Complex
11 Venice Bitch
09 Fuck it I Love You
10 Doin' Time
08 Love Song
10 Cinnamon Girl
08 How to Disappear
10 California
08 The Next Best American Record
10 The Greatest
09 Bartender
09 Happiness is a Butterfly
10 hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it

I'm absolutely drunk on this album right now. She is cementing her position as one of my favourite artists ever

Cinnamon Girl was stuck in my head all night and literally stopped me from sleeping :D
 
Love Doin’ Time so much, the rest I’ve heard haven’t been as instant as the last album and will require more listening.
 
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