Lana Del Rey

I loved Born To Die and Ultraviolence but Honeymoon is such a drag. I liked the singles and there a few other good songs (24, Freak and Swan Song) but the rest of the songs leave no impression at all. I'm shocked to see she's getting such good reviews all over the place.

Don't know why I kept going in this thread to bash her. The albums are not too bad. Got caught up in the hype/anti-hype.

I love this. It's not as immediate as Ultraviolence but has the same kind of internal coherence.

I don't like it as much as Ultraviolence

Ultraviolence is some kind of weird classic. It's begging to be redicovered by hipsters 20 years from now.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-0919-lana-del-ray-20150920-story.html

Her beef is that the guys in helicopters — not to mention the guys trailing her outside Ralphs or through New York City mass transit — are taking images of the wrong moments, damaging the glamorous but unknowable persona she's so carefully cultivated.

[...]

Her first words on the album go even further: "We both know that it's not fashionable to love me," she sings, luxuriating in each syllable. This is obviously nonsense: Del Rey has never been more in demand among trendsetting mavericks, be it Kanye West, who hired her to sing at his wedding, or the Weeknd, who drafted her for a duet on his new album. But the line gives an indication of how she's absorbed the polarized reaction to her work, which has spawned as many enemies as acolytes.

[...]

She ends the record with a beautifully spooky rendition of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," a song that two or three years ago — back when Del Rey was regularly taken for some kind of phony record-label invention — would've felt like an appeal for objective clarity.

Now it's the opposite: See me the way I want to be seen, the song demands.

garbage music

the more LDR doubles down on her aesthetic the realer she gets imo. if born to die failed because there were too many moments where the spell was broken through clumsiness, the more monochrome ultraviolence and honeymoon pretty much solve that problem, even if they sound initially samey throughout...

I now find it impossible to hear her without scanning for lyrics that could be chili pepper lyrics, in part because there are so many

She should cover "Under the Bridge".

californiambienication

they did steal the melody in "salvatore" from the sax line of "careless whisper", right?

epitome of "genius steals" if so.

http://m.pitchfork.com/news/61340-lana-del-rey-answering-hotline-from-honeymoon-album-art/

It's called marketing

wait there's seriously a track that's just her reading eliot?

yes!

ㅠㅠ

there's also a secret 2-hour long track of her watching sunset boulevard

born to die went platinum, it didn't fail in any respect

she owes no one anything, in the real world she's already on mount rushmore with beyonce and taylor swift and whoever else, people who try to insist that she still has literally anything left to prove only succeed in outing their own pathetic naïveté

idk how anyone could prefer this to Ultraviolence. Everything blurs.

ultraviolence was a bit too rocky for my liking. i never really got into it. i find this more true to her essence.

What are people's favourite songs on this? I hear a mood I like but I don't hear any standouts.

Terrence Loves You, 24, Swan Song, The Blackest Day and Freak are my favourites.

Gutted that 24 won't be the theme tune for a series of 24

in the real world she's already on mount rushmore with beyonce and taylor swift and whoever else

sigh, his name is THEODORE ROOSEVELT, get an education

also are the black keys on mount rushmore in the real world, they have platinum album from around that time

beyonce, taylor swift, lana del ray. the american ideal incarnate.

i like the new one but not as much as ultraviolence, that seems like the album she was born to make

Crazy LDR has managed to get three albums out in the time its taken Adele to follow up 21, imagine the ink stone temple pilots coulda got if Vs didn't come out until after Tiny Music

IT'S SPELLED "DEL REY" YOU FUCKING HERETICS

lana del rey and missy elliott remain the two artists that i'm mystified are misspelt as much as they are

how else does one spell missy elliott

I have a much easier time w/ this sequencing:

God Knows I Tried
Music to Watch Boys To
High By the Beach
Terrence Loves You
24
(Interlude)
Salvatore
Freak
The Blackest Day
Honeymoon

also that way it opens w/ "Sometimes I wake up in the morning" and ends w/ "dreaming away your life" and I'm a sucker for shit like that

xxp people leave off the second T

how else does one spell missy elliott

eliot/elliot most common misspelling for me, it's obvious at all imo

What are people's favourite songs on this? I hear a mood I like but I don't hear any standouts.

― impossible raver (Re-Make/Re-Model), Thursday, September 24, 2015 7:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"the blackest day" is the strung-out epic that everything seems to build towards, and actually works

"music to watch boys to", "god knows i tried", "high by the beach" and "salvatore" otherwise

the criticism that it all blurs together was actually my initial issue with ultraviolence but imo the more it blurs together into this sad, inward-fixating, monomaniacal mood, the better LDR is. yeah it's almost oppressive in its refusal to deviate from that mood but her albums stand or fall on whether she breaks the spell - "art deco" comes closest, a lil too on the nose, but not as bad as some of the tracks on born to die (the sparser arrangements really help in this) (oh and obv her "don't let me be misunderstood" cover is unnecessary and slightly embarrassing but i just pretend it's a bonus track)

"God Knows I Tried" is the big standout for me, but that's probably because it sounds the most like a song from Ultraviolence, which I still like better.

Yesterday I put all three albums (I don't have Paradise and need to get it) on shuffle and realized how many small, subtle shifts there are to her performances, not just from song to song but from line to line. She's really not a monotonous singer in the way of, say, Nico. Within her overall sleepwalking style there's a tremendous amount of activity beneath the surface.

yeah for sure, and she's doing some really effective things in her upper range on this album

Any numbers on this yet? I hope it sells a kajillion copies.

Not many standouts for me, which is just another way Lana is weird - she's a pop artist who makes albums rather than singles. It's an album you play from start to finish, preferably on a decent sound system (I was amazed at how much I liked Salvatore on my stereo considering I wrote the whole thing off after streaming it). I'm not sure if I love it yet but I really enjoy the sound, it's like it transforms my whole apartment, like a new colour on the walls. The Simone cover is really not good though, and if it's an attempt at commentary it goes over my head.

The fact that all of the album blurs together and nothing really stands out is actually a positive for this album. I've already listened to this a bunch of times. I might actually like this as much as Ultraviolence.

the song lengths add to the whole 'stuck in the same loop' vibe; 3 songs are 4:55, 2 are 4:51, another 2 are 4:41 etc

Aside from the lovely and unexpected counter melody that arrives about two thirds of the way thru the title track, the few listens to this didn't hit the spot the way her best stuff does for me.

Normally I'm a big fan of artists finding their voice and rejecting the conventions the industry is pushing them to stick with. But as a bit of a late-comer to LDR, I find her stuff works best when her smoky/spooky/goofball aesthetic is allowed to ooze around within more formal strictures – genre exercises, more traditional verses & choruses and strong, clear melodies.

When the form itself becomes as hazy as her voice—as has been the case on a lot of the last two records—the whole thing, yeah, just kind of fades into the ether. But the real trouble is, you begin to lose what a good melodicist she can be as a songwriter – which, in turn, kind of buries her (really great) sense of humor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDVBfzcSMjg

relistening to born to die and it is so striking how much more accomplished she's become in terms of sound design. the early stuff sounds SO clunky in comparison

I like her Daniel Johnston cover

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/hear-lana-del-reys-aching-daniel-johnston-cover-20151110

feel like this album kind of came out and just flatlined.

if you mean commercially it's pretty obviously not a "big hit singles" kind of album

Still can't get into it. It's half the record Ultraviolence was. A shame - I thought she was going to get better and better but she's just becalmed. Bad idea to get Rick Nowels to produce as well as write.

I think I actually prefer it to Ultraviolence now - didn't see that coming