Jared

I'm surprised that Spin didn't review this (yet).

I really like it.

The AV Club critic is clearly biased against Lana. Very predictable review.

If Lindsay is reviewing it, Lana will be lucky to get anything over 4. But we all know that Pitchfork is going to give her a bad score no matter what, so why even bother about it?

It's just interesting how male rappers can make racist, homophobic, sexist or any other remark and get free pass for it. They can rap/sing about the most absurd and ridiculous things and barely ever catch flack for it. 

Lana's music can be good as theirs, but she won't get away with it like they do. 

And this oh she's inauthentic, she has stage persona bullshit is still the most ridiculous criticism here. Who is really authentic and genuine? Who doesn't have a stage persona? I understand why some may find Lana's act to be a bit over the top, but come on. When Video Games first came out in 2011, press acted like she was the first musician ever who developed new stage persona and new name. 

MetaCritic reviews to look forward to:

 

Consequence of Sound (LDRO said it was very positive)

New York Times (very positive notes in the interview, but will the reviewer agree?)

Pretty Much Amazing (tweeted that the album was "very good")

Rolling Stone (I wouldn't expect anything above a 3/5, but will be interesting to read)

Billboard (they have been in love with her recently...see Coachella review)

Pitchfork (change of heart?)

 

Entertainment Weekly's 100 still hasn't been added. 

James Reed @GlobeJamesReed · 2h

Haven't said this in a while: Lana Del Rey has left me awestruck. Her new album, "Ultraviolence," is staggeringly good.

https://twitter.com/GlobeJamesReed/status/477536463861452800

Staff music critic for the Boston Globe. 

New: Lana Del Rey, “Cruel World”

 

“Cruel World” is the stunner that opens up Lana Del Rey’s new album, Ultraviolence and it just happens to be the best song on the album that wasn’t given the pre-release single treatment. Those single–“West Coast”, “Shades of Cool”, the title track, and “Brooklyn Baby”–are all great, too.

 

Earlier today we shared “Is This Happiness,” an international-release bonus track from the album. It’s a lovely song made even more poignant in light of LDR’s recent, morbid interviews.

 

Ultraviolence is out June 17.

 

http://prettymuchamazing.com/music/lana-del-rey-cruel-world

Wow. It must be so hard for these indie sites to admit that they like it. This one is really something.

Lana Del Rey Is the Urban Outfitters of Music

 

Lana Del Rey lied to my face. Sitting in the shadows backstage at Lollapalooza last summer, I asked her about her leaked Lady Gaga diss track (“So Legit”). She said she had never met Gaga, that this was a big misunderstanding and the press likes to turn one pop star against another. Thing is, they’ve been photographed together, including high-profile pictures shot by Terry Richardson. Later, an Interscope rep asked me to erase that portion of my interview, or Lana wouldn’t be signing the release forms for publication. He phrased it interestingly: “Lana doesn’t feel comfortable with what she said.”


I’ve thought of this strange incident often as debates over Lana Del Rey’s authenticity continue to make what feels like a real dent in the infinite abyss that is the Internet — because we still have no idea who Lana Del Rey really is. Face to face, she is a likable lost puppy, self-deprecating to Larry David lengths and much more charming. She’s smarter than people give her credit for, despite a tendency to jump from one symbolic topic to another, Dylan to Ginsberg in the blink of an eye. Still, the truth remains just another thing for Lana Del Rey to curate.

 

For her second act, though — her sophomore album, Ultraviolence — she’s trying to convince us of her authenticity. That this down-to-earth, self-aware woman in recent interviews is her true self, and the flower-crown glamor goddess in her songs is an act. I don’t believe any of it for a second, and I don’t care. Lana Del Rey is my only guilty pleasure.

I say this as someone who falls in love every time I listen to Top 40 radio, and who believes the guilty pleasure label to be a needless social construct. I make an exception for Lana Del Rey because truly nothing is new here, and I feel guilty because I recognize the culturally charged images she’s co-opting. She’s the Urban Outfitters of music: you know it’s a knockoff of someone else’s original idea and that its references are meticulously targeted to you as a demographic, rather than you as a real human being. You don’t care, you just have to have that circle scarf regardless.

 

Every season without fail, Urban Outfitters changes its displays to reflect new trends and moods, offering shoppers the chance to become a cast of interesting characters with just the change of a dress. Ultraviolence is a bit like that, too. From Thriller to Teenage Dream, the most commercially successful pop albums become collections of big singles that take on worlds of their own. On Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey creates distinct personas on each song, but they feel like they’re all capable of coming from one female narrator — not necessarily Lana — as she finds herself in increasingly fucked-up situations. “Brooklyn Baby” name-checks Lou Reed and speaks of a musician beau; “Shades of Cool” is about a hip guy who’s just out of reach; “Ultraviolence” hints, disturbingly, at either domestic abuse or BDSM; “Fucked My Way to the Top” is about a tawdry star-making affair; “Sad Girl” sounds like a wife’s counter to “The Other Woman.” On and on it goes, as the narrator changes from a leather jacket to a red party dress to fresh linen and curls.

 

The album’s dreamy final track, “The Other Woman,” recalls Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic, The Apartment, about an affair bringing Shirley MacLaine to the emotional brink while the perfect single man (Jack Lemmon) is standing right in front of her. Atop brooding brass and riffs, Lana sings of the other woman’s French perfume, manicured nails, and fresh-cut flowers in each room, all cheap prizes in comparison to her ultimate loneliness after the lust fades. If the song were meant as a consolation, consider it scratchy, generic brand tissue, while The Apartment is your grandmother’s handkerchief. We know one is significantly better quality, but does it really matter in the moment?

Think of it like a Tumblr feed that reblogs evocative photographs but never produces any itself. “I don’t think there’s any shock value in my stuff – well, maybe the odd disconcerting lyric – but I think other people probably deserve the criticism, because they’re eliciting it,” she told The Guardian recently, and she’s right: do you take issue with the curator, or the creator?

In this sense, Lana’s curation of imagery has improved since her first album, 2012’s Born to Die, where she famously dubbed herself the “gangster Nancy Sinatra.” She sounds less like an iconography-spewing Stepford Wife on Ultraviolence, an album whose title references A Clockwork Orange and where the songs can only be described as mournfully gorgeous. But it doesn’t mean these aren’t recycled narratives.

Until she produces her own original images, Lana Del Rey will remain a pop star for the Tumblr generation, for the girls who — season in and season out — look to Urban Outfitters to tell them who to be. What perfect synergy: they can buy a special vinyl edition of Ultraviolence there. And the rest of us? We still have no idea who the person behind this real-life Tumblr feed is. Which is just the way she likes it.

http://flavorwire.com/462212/lana-del-rey-is-the-urban-outfitters-of-music

It doesn't count on Meta right?

No, but it's a very credible site. 

Album leaks are never fun, but the music industry is starting to figure out that they don’t have to be the demise of a new release. Case in point: Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, which leaked five days before its scheduled debut.

 

Since Born To Die quietly came out in 2012, Del Rey has been violently whipped into superstardom thanks to some viral videos, a few movie soundtrack contributions, piles of interviews to showcase the starlet’s utter eccentricity, and an entire national tour that sold out in minutes.

 

And the album’s leak will only help the singer. She’s already released four songs from Ultraviolence, all of which have been worshiped by fans. A daylong leak just proved the hype is all worth it.

 

Ultraviolence runs off the flow of the Paradise EP. Instead of hip-hop and over-produced sampling, Del Rey is performing in the dim of a jazz club humid with the heat of a southern summer. Her vocals are higher and, accompanied by a live band, the music is richer.

 

True to her retro fashion, Lana opens Ultraviolence with the Magical, six-and-a-half-minute Mystery Tour of “Cruel World,” a psychedelic track showcasing how right producer Dan Auerbach was in getting a complete band to enhance Del Rey’s crazy-beautiful world.

 

That devotion to dysfunctional romance is often what gets people pissed off about the singer, but that hasn’t stopped Del Rey from saturating her music with it. “Ultraviolence,” released earlier this month, pissed a lot of people off for its seeming glorification of domestic violence. “Sad Girl” slowly intoxicates you with brushed snare, blues and touches of Spanish guitar as Lana seems unable to differentiate between being a bad girl and a sad one. Likewise, “Pretty When You Cry” can’t separate beauty from pain in the same way a singer alone on stage accompanied by just an electric guitar is both heartbreaking and lovely.

 

Bonus track “Black Beauty” is one of the record’s darkest tracks and one of its most vibrant highlights. An ‘80s power slow dance, the song explores Del Rey’s response to a man trapped in his own despair; life may be beautiful, but Lana dons a black leather wedding dress, dark Spanish hair and black nails. Like Picasso’s Blue Period, the song creates art even in the depths of darkness.

 

But the album isn’t all glorified self-loathing; some of the old Born To Die themes of badass wealth and fame are back with songs like “Fucked My Way Up To The Top,” the unapologetic acknowledgement of past sins for the sake of success, and “Florida Kilos,” where Lana’s childish vocals are met with warmer guitar and coke on the beach. Even “Shades of Cool” is a love song of dreamy orchestra and divine bass line founded on the coolness of a guy who drives a Chevy Malibu and loves his drugs as much as he loves his girls.

 

“Money Power Glory” is the absolute height of this worship of the material world. If you’re going to listen to any song off Ultraviolence, this needs to be it. With spiritual crescendos and guitar wailing right alongside church-worthy vocals, Del Rey’s ability to turn money, power and glory into religious icons converges into a new take on a centuries-old descant: “Hallelujah, I want to take you for all that you got.”

 

Part of what makes Lana Del Rey so enigmatic is her ability to write songs about groveling over a man and making money into legitimate pieces of music. The band on Ultraviolence certainly doesn’t hurt, allowing Del Rey’s voice to be enveloped in California reggae rhythm and foggy reverb on “West Coast” or the low-time jazz of the 1940s on “The Other Women.” No, Del Rey definitely doesn’t take her music lightly. She recently said in an interview that Lou Reed, one of her heroes mentioned in “Brooklyn Baby,” was set to duet with Lana on the track. But the legend died two minutes after she landed to meet with him, on October 27, 2013.

 

“Old Money” is a new take on her 1954 “Blue Velvet” cover and is much less vulgar than her other tracks. Without percussion and in a lower range, Lana sings of the power of youth and the glamor of the past in a piece that could have been performed in the ‘50s itself, the decade rock ‘n’ roll began. And bonus track “Guns and Roses” is a true ode to that ‘80s electric we hear sprinkled throughout the record in Lana’s praise of a big hair, bad boys and the love of your life shredding on his Vigier Excalibur. This record’s musicianship is irrefutable.

 

Ultraviolence as a whole is like Penny Lane overdosing on Quaaludes: crying yet romantic, both loved and unloved, the most elegant representation of female tactlessness.

 

With everyone so preoccupied with finding the next song of the summer, what we need this season isn’t more radio-ready tracks from artists who force their sexuality on you so hard that all you can think about is screwing the person next to you at the club.

 

What we need are more records to get high to, to get us excited about musicianship again, to be able to dissect songs because every time you hear them you notice something new. What we need is music that makes you contemplate sex and death and brilliance because of how that music makes you feel and where it takes you. Count your blessings, because Ultraviolence just gave us all that.

5/5 stars

http://www.alterthepress.com/2014/06/atp-album-review-lana-del-rey.html

They like ''Is This Happiness''.   http://www.stereogum.com/1686722/lana-del-rey-is-this-happiness/mp3s/

Next week, Lana Del Rey will release her expansively decadent sophomore album Ultraviolence. It is very good. Most of the bonus tracks, which will appear with various bonus editions of the album, are not so good, an encouraging sign that LDR has learned to focus her strengths and to push the songs that don’t work so well to the margins. There is, however, an exception. “Is This Happiness,” a bonus track that will appear on the iTunes edition of Ultraviolence, is a woozily lovely piano ballad that stands up well to the songs that actually made the album. Listen to it below.

 

Great read from Stereogum. They're basically Pitchfork Junior.

There were plenty of good reasons not to like Born To Die, Lana Del Rey’s first album, and there were plenty of bad reasons, too. I hated the album, for reasons both good and bad. Good reasons: It was thin and underwritten and brittle and overproduced, its album tracks lacking the grand fucked-out majesty of early singles “Video Games” and “Blue Jeans,” and it felt like it was rushed to market once those early singles started to resonate. The bad: I was pissed at her for not being the second coming of Fiona Apple (who came back later that year anyway) and because her lyrics came off like “a drunk chick at the bar trying to convince someone to come home with her.” The Fiona Apple thing wasn’t fair; it was me trying to fit an existing artist int a preexisting mold. The “drunk chick” thing was worse, and not just for the slut-shaming sexism in the language I used. That drunk-chick thing — or a more glamorous variant on it, anyway — is the Lana Del Rey character. When LDR’s backstory first circulated, when people realized that she’d started out as a journeyman singer-songwriter named Lizzy Grant, internet malcontents held this up as evidence that LDR wasn’t authentic. But of course she wasn’t authentic. Inauthenticity was a a massively important part of her entire project, one of the engines that gave her entire persona its force. It’s like how Vampire Weekend started out satirizing Ivy League privilege while at the same time embodying its stereotypes. Lana Del Rey is a construction. And now that the former Lizzy Grant has had a longer time to develop and inhabit that construction, she’s made an album leagues beyond her debut. Ultraviolence is a gorgeous, shattering piece of work, and it’s just as euphorically fake as Born To Die was. It’s just that LDR fakes it realer now.

The difference between Born To Die and Ultraviolence is vast, and I chalk it to the two years of experience that Lana Del Rey has had in playing her character. It’s like when a supporting actor on a TV show suddenly makes a leap two seasons in. LDR is a very specific character: A coastal-elite pillhead, a girl who strings rich men along and falls for drug-dealer dirtbags. She’s juggling relationships where she has all the power and relationships where she has none. She’s obsessed with transforming herself into a glamorous archetype even as she’s figuring out that the glamorous-archetype lifestyle is no way to live. She knows that people thinks the way she acts is fucked up, and she delights in the judgement of others, even as she realizes she’s not really doing anything to make herself happier. And as a lyricist, she’s gotten great at laying out those contradictions in a few quick strokes, leaving much to the imagination. A song like “Sad Girl” is, in some ways, a fascinating work of side-piece blues: “Being a bad bitch on the side / It might not appeal to fools like you / Creeping around while he gets high / It might not be something you would do / But you haven’t seen my man.” Then, a few lines later, she’s chanting “I’m a sad girl” over and over, and you don’t really see any reason to disbelieve her.

 

There’s an element of satire to what Lana Del Rey does, and that sometimes comes through more clearly than it does other times. On “Brooklyn Baby,” the sneer is only barely implied: “Well, my boyfriend’s in the band / He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed / I’ve got feathers in my hair / I get down to Beat poetry / And my jazz collection’s rare / I can play most anything / I’m a Brooklyn baby.” But there’s a quiet kind of empathy there, too. As with any great performance artist, it’s never entirely clear where Lizzy Grant ends and Lana Del Rey begins, and when she gets into the seriously sad stuff in her character’s situation — like on the title track, where she seems to fall under an abusive cult leader’s control — she projects a sense of soft tragedy, a vulnerability that doesn’t feel remotely faked. She gets the grim attraction in self-destructive living, and she gets its price, too.

 

Musically, too, she’s light years from where she was. The awkward clipped half-rapping she tried out on a few Born To Die album tracks is gone altogether, and she’s got more languid grace in her voice. It’s funny; LDR became a big star almost accidentally, thanks to an EDM “Summertime Sadness” remix that couldn’t be further from her regular style. But she hasn’t adapted that sensibility into what she does on Ultraviolence. If anything, she’s moved further away from it and understood that she’s a straight-up torch-song singer, one whose songs need to throb, not thump. Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach seemed like a perversely terrible choice to produce the album, but I can’t imagine anyone doing better with these songs. (Thought experiment: Imagine if Danger Mouse had produced Ultraviolence, how fucking awful that would’ve been.) The glorious seven-minute opener “Cruel World” twinkles and sighs, lazily encircling LDR’s voice like a halo of opium smoke. “West Coast” has a dazed ripple, a quiet danger that reminds me of prime-period Chris Isaak. “Money Power Glory” is a stately hymn, its music lending a sort of nobility to the lyrics’ conquer-everything mentality. Auerbach solos throughout all these songs, but his guitars are quiet, buried murmurs. They don’t seize the spotlight; they add to the atmosphere.

 

I liked Ultraviolence so much that I felt compelled to go back to Born To Die to figure out whether I’d been wrong about it the first time. The verdict: Nope. That album is still mostly crap. By that same token, the bonus tracks that will appear on many editions of Ultraviolence are entirely crap. And that’s fine. They’re bonus tracks for a reason. And the slow, transgressive power of Ultraviolence is no accident. If anything, the suckiness of those bonus tracks is an encouraging sign. LDR, it would seem, is figuring out quality control. She’s writing a ton of songs and keeping the best ones, relegating the others to B-side status, fleshing out her best moments until they achieve a terrible sort of beauty. And given the leap between her first album and her second, I can’t wait to hear what she does next time, when she’s had even more time to explore her character’s nuances.
 

 

Can't wait.

DIY Magazine (goes on Metacritic) 4 stars

She’s a Wes Anderson character that’s wound up in a David Lynch film, and she knows it.

 

It’s hard to forget the mud-slinging, hype-stamping furore that met Lana Del Rey’s debut ‘Born to Die’. By that point, she was already writing songs about being famous, having to deal with zero privacy and fragile relationships - she knew where she was going. Everyone else did, too. Critics might have questioned her beginnings, her route to the top, but it’s all meaningless today. She remains the most curious pop star in the world, a figment of the collective imagination that somehow - despite her otherworldly quality - speaks to fans on a direct, human level.

 

Most songs on ‘Ultraviolence’ link up with a bluesy smoke of a sound. Whereas ‘Born to Die’ flirted with gloss and glitz, this is the sound of Lana hitting the road. Producer Dan Auerbach in tow, most of the time the tempo doesn’t get any quicker than a Kolo Touré sprint. It’s a strung out, tear-drenched collection, beginning epic with opener ‘Cruel World’ and only getting more dramatic as it progresses.

‘West Coast’ is an odd lead single. Within the context of an album, it’s a brilliant track, but like ‘Sad Girl’ and ‘Shades of Cool’, parts of this song feel almost intentionally out of place. Choruses - big, brilliant choruses at that - sweep in out of nowhere after awkward bridges and faltering falsetto-ed build-ups. It’s a strange, uncomfortable form of expression, and it’s a big part of a record that’s a hundred times more cohesive than ‘Born to Die’.

 

 

The highlight, ‘Brooklyn Baby’, manages to bring the dusty, fog-drenched breeze of ‘Ultraviolence’ into one brilliant single. It struts confidence, boasting the tongue-in-cheek line “Yeah my boyfriend’s pretty cool, but he’s not as cool as you.” But it also keeps the fragility that sums up Lana best. She’s a Wes Anderson character that’s wound up in a David Lynch film, and she knows it. ‘Ultraviolence’ sees her playing with pre-conceived ideas. ‘Born to Die’ didn’t have a moment’s notice to deal with the backlash. This second record knocks the rumours and naysayers out of the park. After all, there’s a track called ‘Fucked My Way Up to the Top’. Confused by Lana Del Rey? Good - that’s exactly how you should feel. 

 

http://diymag.com/2014/06/13/lana-del-rey-ultraviolence-album-review

 

 

 

Metascore 74 based on 29 Critics. 

Consequence of Sound 100

Entertainment Weekly 100

Pretty Much Amazing 91

Boston Globe 90

Sputnikmusic 86

Billboard.com 83

Spin 80

Now Magazine 80

Fact Magazine (UK) 80

All Music Guide 80

PopMatters 80

DIY Magazine 80

The Guardian 80

Los Angeles Times 75

Pitchfork 71

Rolling Stone 70

musicOMH.com 70

Drowned In Sound 70

Exclaim 70

Clash Music 70

Slant Magazine 70

New Musical Express (NME) 60

The Telegraph (UK) 60

The Independent on Sunday (UK) 60

The Observer (UK) 60

Chicago Tribune 50

The A.V. Club 42

New York Daily News (Jim Faber) 40

The 405 30 

http://www.metacritic.com/music/ultraviolence/lana-del-rey/critic-reviews

Skip to 11:45 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03z32w3

'I heard the brand new, love of my life, Lana Del Rey's new song, which is awesome.'