Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019)

kinda burnt myself out on this album so I took a long break and it's still great and not in some corny "predicted the 2020 vibe" sorta way. I confess however that I slightly preferred the gonzo "cuts on his face 'cause he fucked too hard" to what I only just realized is the actual lyric, "fought"

Yeah I still love this album. and that song !

also I thought she was releasing a "spoken word album" but it turns out to be the audiobook version of a poetry collection? for some reason though the concepts are sonically identical, this configuration irks me less

wait, sorry, also does this mean pitchfork is going to review an audiobook

yo this album is fucking beautiful

i spent a long time today looking at the sleeve before playing it on my crosley suitcase player. (need to fix my better turntable). it's a really interesting image--the sky looks painted, with thick brushstrokes, while the rest is a photograph. LA is burning in the background.

I'm ashamed to admit that I never looked at it closely enough to see that it was fire and smoke in the background. In my mind I just imagined it to be the orange of a sunset in the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK1YiArMDfg

this might be my favorite track

Last year at this time, I took a long drive listening to this for about the dozenth time, and got a strong prophetic feeling about this record being the last glimpse of a crumbling society before a worldwide disaster. Fortunately 2020 has been completely eventless.

this album manages to take on the idea of america as not just a declining empire, but one that is already over, we're like living in its corpse. somehow the album sustains this big idea. it doesn't collapse under it.

The culture is lit and if this is it, I had a ball
I guess that I'm burned out after all
I'm wasted
Don't leave, I just need a wake up call
I'm facin' the greatest
The greatest loss of them all
The culture is lit and I had a ball
I guess that I'm burned out after all

Bought this a couple of months ago, played it in the car two or three times through. The thing that most struck me was how front-loaded it was--the first three songs were easily the best, I thought.

last is a doozy tho

new single not so hot :(

she's kinda descended into self-parody on it :/

Yeah, pretty bland.

like the melody is extremely ldr by numbers and there's not really anything else going on

Usually she's very good at melodic hooks but... not this time.
IT's a weird choice for a single.

it's ok. not really single material.

MOJO

.. oops

MOJO piece is really good.

I'll pick up a copy to look at next time I'm passing a newsstand or idling in a bookshop

oh wait

MOJO

.. oops

MOJO NIXON collab is really good.

She's the washboard player he needed ever since Skid Roper left.

acc to their review, Weyes Blood sings on the Joni cover.

new album leaked and only listened to first track so far but wow at it

"tulsa jesus freak" is wild, it has this tiny bit of autotune on the vocals that makes it sound haunted, really fantastic atmosphere

album is the folkiest thing she's done, feels like a natural continuation of the first three tracks or so from NFR. pleasantly surprised

antonoff has really outdone himself with the production & arrangements here

"dance till we die" is really something

i think this is solidly her best, it doesn't reach the same peaks as say, "mariners apartment complex" and "venice bitch" but it's way more consistent overall. "let me love you like a woman" is probably the weakest track, i get why it was the lead single but really not too representative.

and the title track is much better in context too

she finally made an album that is good all the way through and isn't 20 minutes too long for its own good!

About to listen - sounds like Ultraviolence structurally which I am so down for

"white dress" namechecjs sun ra and kings of leon, she has truly gone mad with power

who's that singing on "breaking up slowly"?

"white dress", "tulsa jesus freak", "dark but just a game" and "dance till we die" seem to be the highlights. super low key even by her standards. it does *sound* great. I just really need her to ditch the piano on the next one.

also feels much less emotionally turbulent than NFR!, I suspect lots of quarantine meditation

I suspect lots of quarantine medication

i read the lyrics to white dress and hahahahhahaha no

somewhat ironically brad I listened to that one and wondered aloud "is this a coded message to taylor"

this album is the most aggressively uncommercial thing she's released so far.

this album is the most aggressively uncommercial thing she's released so far.

The last album had a nine-and-a-half-minute song, fully half of which was an extended synth solo. It also had "fucking" in its title.

yeah but it also had that sublime cover the label made her include so it would have a radio hit

(that's not to knock it, i really like that cover, but it kind of messes up the flow of the record)

arguably this is still very commercial, her demo has just changed definitively to Mojo readers

she has fully embraced her inner boomer

At her first run of gigs proper (i saw her first ever show weirdly enough) the audience was *very* Mojo; a pretty polite, sedate vibe, she'd been getting a lot of play on BBC6 etc. It was only later on that the first 10 rows became screaming teens.

she's always had that thing that billie eilish does too, at least based on Facebook, where guys my age post about it and say "I usually don't like pop music but this is good"

well like "video games" initially blew up with the indie music press and then she soon crossed over to a mainstream pop audience from there but never fully committed to chasing it long-term so she's just settled with a decent cult following

Have the screaming teens stayed her fans (or been replaced by newer screaming teens), or have they moved on to younger stars?