Ultraviolence Reviews: 74 Metascore (DISCUSS REVIEWS ONLY)

[HEARTCORE 18,833]

Here is the FemaleFirst review. Though they didn't like the album and gave it only 2/5, I'm satisfied with the fact that they actually reviewed the album for the music, instead of taunting Lana. They even go on to say that they wish they could be a fan of Lana, but they just don't like her music.

 

 

 

 

There's something about Lana Del Rey's tone that means you'll either love her music or hate it. She is THE marmite of the music industry, and for the longest time I've been in the latter, finding her music dreary and unimpressive for the most part, with the 'Summertime Sadness' remix and GreatGatsby hit 'Young and Beautiful' being the only tracks I could stomach.

 

Putting that aside I decided to take on 'Ultraviolence' with a fresh approach. Previously reviewing 'West Coast' I had a feeling I knew what to expect - more of the same - but if this collection of new tunes did prove anything to me after a first listen, it was that Lana is one of the more interest stars in the industry.

 

Despite my previous thoughts on 'West Coast' it plays its part here as the song that recaptures your attention - not necessarily upbeat but definitely a little more exciting than those that came before it.

 

To say Lana sings with some emotion is fair, but it's hard to relate to the lyrics she's singing when her sound is so similar throughout.

 

That is until number eight when 'Money Power Glory' finally manages to make an impression on me. Its rambunctious and explosive production force Lana to push her vocals to her limits and it's a real treat for the ears.

 

'Old Money' is hypnotic, allowing her talent to shine in the first few moments when she is given the chance to sing without a heavy echo, and the 'will you still love me when I shine?' gives memories of 'Young and Beautiful'. It's certainly an album standout that comes before the story told in the closing 'The Other Woman'.

 

Haunting and a little spooky with the use of trills toward the end, it seems the perfect song to finish things with.

 

I come away from the record with close to the same feelings I had for Lana's music before. There's a little more hope from me and a real admiration for 'Money Power Glory', but other than this I'm pained to find many positives. Though I wish I was on the loving-Lana express train with her millions of fans, it's one I just cannot seem to board.

 

[whitman 1,286]

Digital Spy 4/5

 

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/music/review/a577571/lana-del-rey-ultraviolence-albu m-review-sounds-better-than-giving-up.html

[howiet1971 188]

I can't even be bothered to read the critics reactions. Why? Cos the only opinion that matters to me about it is mine.

BTD is my fave album of the last decade probably. It's immense. It's luscious. It's painfully beautiful.

UV is almost painful for me. Most songs sound the same . Most vocals are poor in comparison to BTD. The songs and her vocals have lost their beauty for me. I like 3 songs so far. Really hoping it's gonna be a grower. As I've said before, I am a huge Lana fan but not a Lizzy fan. The record company must be crapping themselves.

[howiet1971 188]

And to finish... it's tune less. It's amateur. What on earth was she thinking. It's like she pressed a career self destruct button.

Drivel like Florida Kilos, Fucked My Way. Dear god alive. To think she abandoned a completed album along the lines of black beauty...

Am I on my own?

[Deadly Nightshade 125]

And to finish... it's tune less. It's amateur. What on earth was she thinking. It's like she pressed a career self destruct button.

Drivel like Florida Kilos, Fucked My Way. Dear god alive. To think she abandoned a completed album along the lines of black beauty...

Am I on my own?

I'm tempted to say you are, sir.

[CatchTheBreeze 1,681]

Attitude Magazine - 4,5/5:

 

https://attitude.co.uk/lana-del-reys-ultraviolence-track-track/

 

"It might be morally complicated, emotionally destructive and cripplingly sad, but Ultraviolence is total class."

[lafleursauvage 323]

Haha, my mother never really liked Lana that much. She thought the whole BTD album was just "drowsy" and "put her to sleep". But I showed her some UV songs last night and asked her to give me an honest opinion. She loved it. She'd always heard the Black Beauty demo version (b/c I fucking love that song lmao so i always played it...) and when I showed her the UV version she was all like "oh wow... this is gorgeous..."

 

I think my job here is done 

[HEARTCORE 18,833]

And to finish... it's tune less. It's amateur. What on earth was she thinking. It's like she pressed a career self destruct button.

Drivel like Florida Kilos, Fucked My Way. Dear god alive. To think she abandoned a completed album along the lines of black beauty...

Am I on my own?

I don't think you are. I personally adore that album, but there's quite a few fans who feel let down and dislike UV.

 

Personally, I believe your statements about UV are more applicable to BtD than UV. Lana is such a talented lyricist, yet I feel she abandoned this wonderful ability when writing for BtD. Don't get me wrong, there are some pretty good tracks on there (National Anthem, OTTR, Lolita, Blue Jeans), but I feel the album as a whole is a bit amateurish. I think she really stepped up here game for UV and I believe her fantastic lyricism shine through on the album, especially on tracks like Brooklyn Baby, Is This Happiness, Flipside and Old Money. :flutters:

[lostindarkparadise 1,927]

Entertainment Weekly - A (5/5?) 

 

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20824995,00.html

[rdp 1,240]

http://www.clashmusic.com/reviews/lana-del-rey-ultraviolence

7/10 from Clash Magazine

 

Gonna try and uptade my post later with all those new reviews lel

[lafleursauvage 323]

Entertainment Weekly - A (5/5?) 

 

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20824995,00.html

 

 

  I FEEL LIKE A PROUD MAMA 

[markeyvee 221]

So what I'm seeing most reviews have been positive! Which is great. Maybe she'll stop complaining about critics. 

[lafleursauvage 323]

Don't know if this has already been posted but I found a new review on Stereogum!!! 

 

http://www.stereogum.com/1686631/premature-evaluation-lana-del-rey-ultraviolence/franchises/premature-evaluation/

 

"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. "

 

[Jared 3,128]

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.
 

 

[ilovetati 15,295]

Black Beauty was definitely not "crap."

[Jared 3,128]

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.

 

[Rem 2,392]

 

And to finish... it's tune less. It's amateur. What on earth was she thinking. It's like she pressed a career self destruct button.

Drivel like Florida Kilos, Fucked My Way. Dear god alive. To think she abandoned a completed album along the lines of black beauty...

Am I on my own?

Actually, I FELT the same way. You can go ask the sistren on Atrl.net who got me banned because of my rant. Lol

 

But I saw the light... Let it in sistren.

 

 

 

Let it SINK in. Appreciates the imperfections of the album that's why it's so great.

 

The vocal performance on this album is NOT POP whatsoever. They are not clean but they serve a purpose.

 

The songs are SCATTERED with very awkward unusual melodies e.g Cruel World, Sad Girl, Pretty When You Cry, Brooklyn Baby (most of the album tbh)

 

BTD is so clean and perfect... The melodies are beautiful but they are very "safe" and "typical" with punchy beat and hooky chorus.

 

 

UV is like someone beat and punch BTD.

 

Hhmmmmm how to express this properly:

 

 

BTD:

 

 

UV:

 

 

 

If you let the light in (it's cruel world) you will be able to see thee BEAUTY in both.

[naachoboy 7,977]

Actually, I FELT the same way. You can go ask the sistren on Atrl.net who got me banned because of my rant. Lol

 

But I saw the light... Let it in sistren.

 

 

 

Let it SINK in. Appreciates the imperfections of the album that's why it's so great.

 

The vocal performance on this album is NOT POP whatsoever. They are not clean but they serve a purpose.

 

The songs are SCATTERED with very awkward unusual melodies e.g Cruel World, Sad Girl, Pretty When You Cry, Brooklyn Baby (most of the album tbh)

 

BTD is so clean and perfect... The melodies are beautiful but they are very "safe" and "typical" with punchy beat and hooky chorus.

 

 

UV is like someone beat and punch BTD.

 

Hhmmmmm how to express this properly:

 

 

BTD:

 

 

UV:

 

[imghttp://thebeautyofawiltedroseofficial.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/wilted_rose_happinessisfree.jpg?w=584[/img]

 

 

If you let the light in (it's cruel world) you will be able to see thee BEAUTY in both.

 

Actually, I FELT the same way. You can go ask the sistren on Atrl.net who got me banned because of my rant. Lol

 

But I saw the light... Let it in sistren.

 

 

 

Let it SINK in. Appreciates the imperfections of the album that's why it's so great.

 

The vocal performance on this album is NOT POP whatsoever. They are not clean but they serve a purpose.

 

The songs are SCATTERED with very awkward unusual melodies e.g Cruel World, Sad Girl, Pretty When You Cry, Brooklyn Baby (most of the album tbh)

 

BTD is so clean and perfect... The melodies are beautiful but they are very "safe" and "typical" with punchy beat and hooky chorus.

 

 

UV is like someone beat and punch BTD.

 

Hhmmmmm how to express this properly:

 

 

BTD:

 

 

UV:

 

[imghttp://thebeautyofawiltedroseofficial.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/wilted_rose_happinessisfree.jpg?w=584[/img]

 

 

If you let the light in (it's cruel world) you will be able to see thee BEAUTY in both.

i see that you saw the light   im glad. 

[whitman 1,286]

Finally Stereogum admitted they were unfair with her. I mean, they still think BtD was shit ( I don't love it either), but the attacks were so personal, so destructive and slut-shaming. It was definetely not necessary. 

 

 

Now let's pray for the Pitchfork and RS reviews does the same ( but judging by how they write about her, I still think they will trash the album)

[naachoboy 7,977]

 

Finally Stereogum admitted they were unfair with her. I mean, they still think BtD was shit ( I don't love it either), but the attacks were so personal, so destructive and slut-shaming. It was definetely not necessary. 

 

 

Now let's pray for the Pitchfork and RS reviews does the same ( but judging by how they write about her, I still think they will trash the album)

 

RS and P4 gave BTD a 40, i dont think they can go lower with this one :S?