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veniceglitch

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Posts posted by veniceglitch

  3. Posted

    Lana's "Alabama Year" was probably more like a week-long Deliverance-themed road trip. I assume that many of her tropes are based on brief experiences/ideas that impacted her and shaped her sense of self, but chronologically, weren't that significant. (The cult thing, the '7 year?!' relationship with the music mogul, the scary 'meth era'.) And I think she spins different versions of the same story, or new stories altogether, that complement whatever aesthetic/preoccupation she currently has going on. Let's say she gets further inspired by Sixties' left-leaning music and drug culture, but this time with a British or German angle. I'm sure she'll suddenly have stories about how the Canterbury scene influenced her, or how she spent a previously unmentioned mystery year in Berlin (Bowie style) and while she was there discovered Krautrock and German philosophy. (Because it's Lana, it can't just be that she looked it up online, she has to have been there.)  :quote:

     

    LDR is the ultimate adapted screenplay experience.

     

    And I don't mind that at all. Facts aren't relevant to most art.

    5

  6. Posted

    I think it's definitely an update on Young & Beautiful, as others have said. But really, I think it's about fading youth, transformation, girlhood vs womanhood, and pondering what her future holds when her fantasy, looks, naivety, and her men fail her. I think it's really LDR waving goodbye to the past iterations — Trailer Park Princess, Ms. 4th of July, Lolita, et al and evolving into her new life phase, The Lonesome Queen, a precocious girl turned grown-ass complicated woman now more at home in dark jazz clubs and empty mansions than gas stations and high school parking lots. It's very Frances Farmer / Blanche DuBois. (This comparison has been written about.)

    I've always noticed this wide-eyed Jezebel-in-training/jaded, world-weary woman tension in LDR's music, and wondered how long she would hold onto the adolescent motifs given that she's nearing 30 and in many ways seems like an old soul. But that's just it: youth and beauty never really reflects on itself — someone yearning for it does (aka someone on the outside looking in, which LDR's music definitely is). Lana's music is almost never about living in the present, even with all those sensory/action words and use of the present voice — it's always about 'remember when,' 'what could have been,' and an imagined past. So, it makes sense that she, as a young but wise woman of 29, would already reminisce about the naive "power of youth" of her own recent/theoretical past. But I think with this album, and this song + The Other Woman tellingly following it, she's ready to let go of girlhood and embrace her dark and isolated matriarch throne. 

    Her doing the Malificent theme song actually (if coincidentally) speaks volumes. Lana longs to be the passive, eternally young, and lovely Sleeping Beauty but she will always, deep down, be the equally beautiful, but mortal, complex and tortured Malificent.

    2

  7. Posted

    Top Trilogy/Perfection: Sad Girl / FMWUTTT / Ultraviolence

     

    Next Best/Seriously great: West Coast / Brooklyn Baby / Shades of Cool / Cruel World / PWYC

     

    Very Good: MPG / Old Money  / The Other Woman

     

    Bonus: 

     

    1) Is This Happiness

    2.) Black Beauty

    3.) Flipside

    4.) GNR

    5.) Florida Kilos

     

    FK feels so out of place on an otherwise fully formed, cohesive artistic statement. It feels like a throwaway from the LG days, back when Lizzy was more obsessed with being Lolita than The Lonesome Queen.

    2

  9. Posted

    Pretty When You Cry and Is This Happiness are really moving songs.

    And I also consider Body Electric as a kind of sad song and it depicts the mood of feeling alone very well.

     

    These three might be my most poignant picks, too. Ride's monologue, too.

     

    PWYC is so red-raw, you can't deny the power of its pain. She's trying to stay proud, but she's falling apart in it. The cracked voice is so important to its experience, as she says.

    0

  13. Posted

    Week #2 projected sales:  :awkney:

     Ed Sheeran (Atlantic) 190-210k

    Sam Smith (Capitol) 67-72k
    *G-Eazy (Blueprint/RCA) 43-48k
    Lana Del Rey (Interscope) 40-45k
    Frozen (Walt Disney) 35-40k

     

    That's about a 75% drop, AKA high, but average for rock-oriented releases. Jack's White second week figures, for example:

     

     

    1 8 JACK WHITE THIRD MAN/COLUMBIA 32,710 -75% LAZARETTO
    0

  14. Posted

    It's the Herald-Sun (Murdoch press). I'm thankful they spelled 'Lana' correctly.

     

    Also, this isn't really a review, more a discussion about the record, but William Bennett is one of my favourite artists/musicians who has been around in experimental/wild music since the late 1970's (http://www.allmusic.com/artist/whitehouse-mn0000820195) - the two are not 100% positive about UV and LDR, and they seem to get things about her that a lot of journalists just don't understand at all.

     

    http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/conversations/william-bennett-and-lisa-blanning-on-lana-del-reys-ultraviolence/

    He gets it.

     

    "A lot has been said in reviews about all these dodgy men referred to in the songs and, barring the bonus tracks, I don’t feel the main tracks on Ultraviolence are really about these men. They’re much more a vehicle for her own responses or narcissism, which clearly is what interests her audience, and me."

     

    "This song “Pretty When You Cry” from Ultraviolence, portraying a woman checking out the wreckage of a horrible face after or during crying is a powerful notion, and it’s something that you definitely wouldn’t expect in mainstream modern songs, these ideas of beauty in misery or tragedy."

     

    "It’s remarkable how uncompromising the whole project is. And considering it’s selling these kinds of numbers, I think she’ll have quite a long successful career."

     

    And I love Cut Hands!

    2

  17. Posted

    So, it's official.

     

    I don't know Lana's final #s but I got this on Sam:

     

    "HOLLYWOOD, CA – British soul singer and songwriter Sam Smith has made U.S. pop music history with his debut album, In The Lonely Hour, selling more copies in its first week of release – 166,000 – than any other debut album by a UK male artist in the 23-year history of Soundscan.  The Capitol Records album will enter the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart next week at #2, propelled by the artist’s Top-Ten hit single, “Stay With Me,” which has just surpassed sales of one million copies this week."

    0

  18. Posted

    When you're building an enigma, I suppose mixing your messages and giving conflicting viewpoints within the space of a week is fine. But, humorously, I was just in a brand identity meeting for work and I ended up thinking about how disastrous Lana would be at managing any brand other than her own. When businesses contradict themselves in a message or presentation, people jump ship. Only an artist can get away with it, and as we know, even most pop singers nowadays are afraid to go "off-brand." Everything is curated and planned to a painful extent; this is why media training is now standard for stars-to-be. For Lana, everything in her world is art directed, but in interview form, when she's not in full control, it all goes scattershot. Her mind really is made of mercury, and it's both fascinating and frustrating.

    5

  23. Posted

    She's also made a point to stand up for Lana in the press since Day One.

     

    From 2012, Vanity Fair:

     

    SM: I’m looking at what’s happened with Lana Del Rey, and I feel sympathy for her. That kind of venom is what I attracted when we first came out. Everyone called me a fake even though I’d been in bands for a decade—everybody was really on our back. We weren’t “real,” whatever that fucking meant.

    What’s the driving force behind the Lana backlash? Is it just because she’s good looking?

    SM: She’s beautiful. She’s really talented. She’s the real deal, and I think that’s threatening to people. She clearly has an aesthetic and clearly has worked hard before she got to this point in her career. She has a past? God forbid, they lambasted her for having a musical past. It’s good she’s failed and she had the wherewithal to try again. Shouldn’t we be applauding her for that?

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