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

I’m hungover again, have been SHOPPING (:shock:) and am now terribly worn out, so it’s vin rouge time and this album is sounding fantastique (although I shall be removing ‘Doin’ Time’ as it ruins the mood)

LDR RATE

1. Honeymoon - Always and forever. I mean JESUS GOD. Pass the cognac and Quaaludes would you Quimby :disco:
2. Lust For Life (apart from the guests)
=3. Norman Fucking Rockwell!
=3. Ultraviolence
5. Paradise
6. Born To Die - I never feel the urge to return to this. Why even bother when what she’s done ever since has been so much better?
 
01. Paradise
02. Lost for Life
03. Born To Die
04. Honeymoon
05. Ultraviolence
 
Suedey said:
That sequence of Cinnamon Girl / How to Disappear / California / Next Best American Record though.

I can't.
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Well QUITE. It's a very good album almost start to end but this section is really where it takes off and explores new territory for Lana - the way both Cinnamon Girl and California (the best song here and obvious next single) pack HUGE, unexpected post-choruses in which she actually belts (!) with a vocal urgency never before heard from her... my poor weave.

There's things I wanna say to you
But I'll just let you live
Like if you hold me without hurting me
You'll be the first who ever did

A lyric/melody so good she spends about 2 minutes just singing it OVER and OVER :disco:

The Next Best American Record is also sensational, and Love Song is not far behind. I actually vastly prefer all four to Mariners/Venice Bitch/Hope which are just a touch too standard Lana fare for my tastes. I don't know yet how it shapes up next to Lust For Life but this is another excellent work from a true artiste.
 
08 Norman fucking Rockwell
07 Mariners Apartment Complex
07 Venice Bitch
06 Fuck it I Love You
10 Doin Time
08 Love Song
10 Cinnamon Girl
08 How to Disappear
11 California
10 The Next Best American Record
08 The Greatest
06 Bartender
08 Happiness is a butterfly
08 hope is a dangerous thing
 
Jark said:
Well QUITE. It's a very good album almost start to end but this section is really where it takes off and explores new territory for Lana - the way both Cinnamon Girl and California (the best song here and obvious next single) pack HUGE, unexpected post-choruses in which she actually belts (!) with a vocal urgency never before heard from her... my poor weave.

There's things I wanna say to you
But I'll just let you live
Like if you hold me without hurting me
You'll be the first who ever did

A lyric/melody so good she spends about 2 minutes just singing it OVER and OVER :disco:
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I couldn't agree more with every word of this!
 
A little late here also but the video for Doin' Time is quite simply exceptional and has elevated an already great song to one of her very best ever. Ugh I love it so much.
 
On track to debut at #3 in the US behind Taylor Swift and Tool.

Lana Del Rey (Interscope) 75-85k, 50-60k (pure sales)

Lust for Life did 107k (80k pure sales) to debut at #1, which was a decline from Honeymoon etc.

The UK numbers so far look like she will surpass Lust for Life's 25k and maybe surpass Honeymoon's 28k opening week? Not sure how front loaded things are on that chart with streaming fucking everything up.

 
The midweeks yesterday are missing streaming data, so that is going to favour Sheeran and Swift far more. So that together with the natural front loading will see that ratio erode . I doubt the position is at risk though - she's already sold nearly as much as Sheeran did in total last week.

Tool are currently #2 behind her, and there must be a good chance they will fall back harder.
 
Although I've just looked on the spotify chart and see that she's doing pleasingly well. Not as well as Sheeran or Swift, but 11 tracks in the top 200 (even if none in the top 50) isn't to be sniffed at, is it?

And should bolster those figures a fair bit as well. I'm guessing high to very high 20s in terms of sales?
 
Yes probably 28k debut, which is the same as Honeymoon and better than Lust For Life (25k).

That score from Pitchfork is phenomenal.
 
Only 1.6k sold from the Monday to Tuesday update, so I think it may fall short of 28k.
 
I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm usually here for a bit of Lana, but I just don't have the patience to listen to this properly :confused: I hope I'll be in the right mood for this soon...
 
California and Cinnamon Girl are such great songs, I can't get over it. I've not been into Lana like this since Born to Die and she's such an evolved artist now. For the longest time I really thought that was the gold standard of Lana albums still but it would be the rare day now that I cherry picked from Born To Die over Lust For Life or Ultraviolence. But even this is making Lana feel massively grown from Ultraviolence. She keeps moving the goalposts so that assessing her older work against the newer stuff hardly even seems fair. God. I'm stanning pretty hard again and I'm surprised by it. I didn't know our Hillsong queen had this power over my anymore.

Even the aforemented highlights of NFR! are great in a totally different way that When The World Was At War or God Bless America are great. The range!

It's fitting that Pitchfork called her the next great American songwriter or whatever statement shit they said (they're feminists now, when not reviewing Madonna) because she totally embodies Americana in an increasingly current way compared with the old Hollywood glam stylings of the first two or three albums. Wow.

This was written after having smoked but I think it makes sense. She is a fabulous gift.
 
She's rightly getting a lot of stick for her thin-skinned response to that NPR review. Most artists in her position would kill to be treated to such a serious, thoughtful write-up of their work.
 
Are you serious? The piece was an absolute EVISCERATION masquerading as a serious thinkpiece. Half of it was a musing on the state of California which has nothing to do with Lana or the music, the rest was criticism of her lyricism, world-building and fascination with non-feminist values (when not observing that she is not, in fact, Joni Mitchell).

It's a takedown and not even a well-written one.
 
Well she's one of the most widely respected critics in the industry, but sure.
 
Have you actually read the piece? It really can't be denied that she's using it to take shots at Lana.
 
I did, and I don't think it's a takedown at all. It's largely complimentary, but tempered. As a review should be.

We're so accustomed these days to 'professional' reviews being completely binary, either click-baity 'takedowns' or glorified fan reviews with no depth or attempt at contextualising the work. This is a literary review in the style of old Rolling Stone profiles and should be taken as such.
 
Lana (AKA Lizzie!) claiming she "hasn't had a persona, never needed one" is SENDING ME :D

I still sort of wish she'd followed through in her threat to retire the Lana Del Rey character after the Paradise EP, and return with an entirely new p̶e̶r̶s̶o̶n̶a̶ take on herself just to see what would have happened :disco:
 
I love the idea of noted queen of green Lana getting absolutely baked then taking to Twitter to attack the haters at random :disco:

Lest we forget the Lust For Life era Pitchfork interview where they had to pause proceedings because Lana started OPENLY WEEPING at the mere mention of Lana 17/10 deep-cut Black Beauty :disco:

If only LOREEN had Lana's work ethic.
 
Just a few "highlights" from that piece for those who can't be arsed to read

"her fifth album and the one that has cemented her status as a serious artist among critics who may or may not have thought her previous work problematic, or at very least, incomplete."
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translation: I thought it was problematic and "incomplete" (whatever that means?) but don't want to say it outright.

Words like "classic" and "greatest" adhere to her now; she writes songs that use them unironically.
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Del Rey remains much more invested in describing how people — mostly women — fall apart, how they take risks or otherwise work against their own best interests in the pursuit of pleasure, intimacy and what she still guilelessly calls "love."
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(Intimating that what she's singing about when she sings about love is not actually love but LDR can't see that because she's a stupid unwoke anti-feminist.)

The album's dominant story line describes an affair with a fellow artist in which the power roles never solidify, a situation Del Rey depicts as unsustainable but clarifying. Addressing this bohemian deadbeat, she upends the gender roles she's so often fetishized, trading in her kitten heels for kicks that allow her to keep walking. She cusses at her "man child," demanding that he grow up.
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Major misreading of the album - it's not about one specific romance, and for a widely respected music critic it's amazing that she missed the fact that the opening lyric of the album ("God damn man-child") is not just about a lover but also a scene-setter for Trump's America which describes the feelings of half a nation toward their President.

On their own, taken song by song, her lyrics – even in the full flower NFR! represents – often read as unremarkable and derivative.

Take "Cinnamon Girl," one of the new album's deep cuts. The title's a mildly clever cop from a Neil Young classic, and the first line, "cinnamon in my teeth from your kiss," takes you somewhere. But then? There's a line about different colored pills, alluding to her sweetheart's addiction, and one about her frustration becoming like fire. B-plus poetics. There's some moaning about how no one has "held me without hurting me," and half-formed thoughts about words she cannot speak. Compare this vague non-story to four lines randomly pulled from Mitchell's 1972 song about her then-lover James Taylor's heroin habit, "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," written when she was five years younger than Del Rey is now: Concrete concentration camp / Bashing in veins for peace / Cold blue steel and sweet fire / Fall into Lady Release.

Mitchell's lyric reads as poetic and incisive. Next to it, Del Rey's feels uncooked.
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Lana Del Rey is not Joni Mitchell, nobody is, and the line she can't be arsed to fully quote ("If you hold me without hurting me, you'll be the first who ever did") is probably the best lyric on the album and is actually pretty direct, not vague.

Sometimes all the song's effects fall away, only to push forward again; there doesn't seem to be much order to the dynamics. The whole effect is slippery, unattached to the process of telling a story. A great songwriter, as we tend to understand that role, would offer a more coherent view.
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Obviously nonsense seeing as Cinnamon Girl has one of the strongest/most straightforward structures of any song on the album, nothing incoherent about it, but at least she's more or less honest by this point about her disdain for Lana's talent or supposed lack thereof.

She is a creature born of trauma, possibly literally, if you take Lizzy Grant's teenage experiences with addiction into account; but certainly aesthetically. At its best, her music absorbs and disorients. It calls for interpretation, but in the most personal sense of the word – it wants to be crazily loved or angrily hated. It wants to trigger you.
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translation: "she's all provocation, nothing serious to say"

Bottom line is the whole thing is fucking dripping in acidic critique that she doesn't have the balls to actually state directly (perhaps you could say she's being vague, not specific - uncooked, not poetic!). I'm sad for you if you think this is quality journalism. It's not.
 
If someone can't be arsed to read the review, I doubt they are going to manage until the end of that.
 
wurst said:
I love the idea of noted queen of green Lana getting absolutely baked then taking to Twitter to attack the haters at random :disco:

Lest we forget the Lust For Life era Pitchfork interview where they had to pause proceedings because Lana started OPENLY WEEPING at the mere mention of Lana 17/10 deep-cut Black Beauty :disco:

If only LOREEN had Lana's work ethic.
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:D at all of this and I can only second the point about Loreen. Endless incredible songs but the lazy cow’s too busy lolling around in her kaftan (with her army of lady lovers) being Sweden’s premier Opium Queen :disco: (if :argh:)
 
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