Like the rest of her magnificent new album Norman Fucking Rockwell, the video has the eerie feel of a transmission from some in-between zone, a surfside way station between life and whatever the hell comes next. 2,” David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes.” Sing it with me: Sometimes you wanna go where everybody on the jukebox is dead. At the bar where she’s performing in “The Greatest,” his groovy “Pacific Ocean Blues” is on the jukebox, along with some other sonic offerings from the beyond: Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye,” Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. Doomed, gone too soon, and briefly acquainted with Charles Manson, Dennis Wilson is a natural choice for Lana Del Rey’s favorite Beach Boy.
“I miss the bar where the Beach Boys would go,” Del Rey sings, “Dennis’s last stop before Kokomo.” Accompanied by little more than an elegiac piano, her voice is as billowing, tragic, and incongruously beautiful as a malfunctioning parachute mid-fall.ĭennis never made it to “Kokomo.” The middle Wilson brother drowned drunk in the Marina Del Rey in December 1983, when he was 39, five years before his former band returned to the charts with a vacation novelty single from the soundtrack of a Tom Cruise movie. The bar is neon lit and mostly empty, save for a few grizzled old bikers staring searchingly into the carbonated abyss of their brews. It feels like a cushion Del Rey knew you’d need.In the mesmerizing music video for Lana Del Rey’s new song “The Greatest,” our heroine is singing and swaying in a room that’s somewhere between 90210’s Peach Pit and the Bang Bang Bar from Twin Peaks.
New lana del rey album 2019 series#
Near the end of “The Greatest,” in which she sings longingly about a bar where the Beach Boys used to go, she strings together a series of short lines that together offer a chilling portrait of life in 2019:Īntonoff keeps playing a little piano lick after that, each repetition slightly softer than the one before it. “Why wait for the best when I could have you?” she wonders over a handsome arrangement lush with horns and strings.Īnd for all her interest in the idea of creating a home - “You don’t ever have to be stronger than you really are when you’re lying in my arms,” she comforts a lover in “California” - Del Rey isn’t blocking out the world outside. The title track is somehow both sensitive and merciless in its description of a “man-child” who talks to the walls when his friends get bored of him. The gratifying thing about this album - beyond its gorgeous melodies and Del Rey’s singing, which has never been more vivid - is that even as she’s mellowed her attack, her sense of humor has grown more pointed.
What stands out now - in an era defined by bleary, depressive pop songs - is someone yearning, as Del Rey does in “Venice Bitch,” for “Hallmark - one dream, one life, one lover.” Or her insistence in the strummy “ Mariners Apartment Complex” that “you took my sadness out of context.” No less influential is her cut-and-paste visual style, which is impossible not to think of every time the opening credits to HBO’s “Succession” come on screen. (She guards her personal life pretty tightly, so we’re left to presume these songs bear some connection to reality.)īut Del Rey is also a proven dissenter, and nearly 10 years after she released her debut album, “Born to Die,” its influence is unmistakable in music by Ariana Grande, Lorde and Billie Eilish. Why the turn toward the light? Del Rey is 34, for one - mature enough by today’s slow-to-grow standards that the old stories about Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash are probably beginning to hold some appeal. “You write, I tour, we make it work,” she sings of a relationship between two creatives in “Venice Bitch.” “You’re beautiful and I’m insane.” The follow-up to 2017’s “Lust for Life,” which featured cameos by the Weeknd and ASAP Rocky, Del Rey’s fifth major-label studio disc surrounds her breathy singing with stately piano and gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar it’s a quieter, more hand-played effort than her earlier work that went for a hip-hop torch-song vibe and made her a favorite of Kanye West, whose wedding she performed at in 2014.
New lana del rey album 2019 free#
Which means she’s free to evolve at her own idiosyncratic pace. But where others can struggle to outlive a viral smash, she offers fans entrée into a fully realized world. She might be the decade’s least likely pop star: a believer in slooow tempos who concentrates on albums at a moment when bite-size singles predominate.
Anyone as obsessed with California as Lana Del Rey is - obsessed with its beauty and its glamour and with the potential for danger that’s always underbellied the swollen promise of this place - was probably destined for a Laurel Canyon phase, and that’s just where we find the singer on her stirring and emotionally risky new album, “Norman F- Rockwell!”
0 kommentar(er)
