Grauniad reckons that Lana Del Rey's masterful
Norman Fucking Rockwell!
is the album of the year
The best albums of 2019, No 1: Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell!
.. I'm tool old and out of touch to know anymore if it's the best album of 2019. These days the guys at the end of The Irishman are probably more in touch with pop culture than I am.
But speaking as LDR fan anyway, from the exact moment I saw the first few seconds of Video Games in 2011
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an awesome achievement
I particularly like the way LDR is introducing me to influences of my era that I've previously ignored, such as Carole King, and my god she is lyrically razor sharp.
"“LA is in flames, it’s getting hot / Kanye West is blond and gone / Life on Mars ain’t just a song.”
I would agree with the Grauniad in that this is an improvement on previous albums but it's not a sharp uptake. She is still crooning about the Bad Boys but she's making it clear It Was Not Satisfactory (Marcia Williams, 1974).
The song 'Venice Bitch' being particularly haunting, illustrative I think that LDR's shtick is evolving, on the Lynch Scale, from Twin Peaks level romantic doomed to Blue Velvet level romantic doomed. LDR's musical persona seems less and less like a victim and more like a carnivorous orchid which will play the victim initially, only to finally emit a smile and consume the real victim slowly in her lyrics over a period of eons.
Context might be making a difference in my case. News is generally so bad I'm avoiding podcasts but personal life is so much better I can listen to music again, and I have to because my commute so much longer.
If there are better visuals to accompany this album (in the UK, in December) than slowly trundling around a neon half built airport in a blue-lit bus beneath the obsidian void of mid winter,.. well.. there isn't one. And you know what?
This commute is so atmospherically doomed it makes all LDR's previous albums awesome as well
Yep. I knew it.
ReplyDeleteYou're from New Joisey.
Lemme tella youse summore
without d'New Yoirk accent, kapiche?