Ultraviolence Reviews: 74 Metascore (DISCUSS REVIEWS ONLY)

[viagra 1,642]

http://www.popmatters.com/post/182777-lana-del-rey-makes-good-on-the-broken-promise-of-video-games-with-ul/

 

Pop Matters 7/10 eligible for Metacritics.

 

The scores are getting better, PM gave 4/10 to BtD. The final metascore will be probably around 70.

 

 

Lana´s biggest problem are her repetitive cliché lyrics. I agree with this. And for critics the lyrics are always one the most important part of review.

[naachoboy 7,977]

Here are the elegible reviewers.  http://www.metacritic.com/faq#item20

[hitnrun017 38]

The guitar is seriously so sexy.

[KillKillQueen 1,298]

The way I see it RS isn't going to stop being sexist towards her, but they also won't give her a really bad grade this time. Pitchfork is likely to totally change their tune about lana though.

[lafleursauvage 323]

The way I see it RS isn't going to stop being sexist towards her, but they also won't give her a really bad grade this time. Pitchfork is likely to totally change their tune about lana though.

 

Ah, omg as a musician I have to say... I love your pun 

 

"Pitchfork is likely to totally change their tune about lana though"

[Jared 3,128]

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

[lafleursauvage 323]

:gclap:  

 

Freaking glorious review! 

[Manueldelrey 72]

It doesn't count on Meta right?

[ilovetati 15,295]

Expect something very positive from Pretty Much Amazing (which goes on MC).

[Jared 3,128]

It doesn't count on Meta right?

No, but it's a very credible site. 

[Jared 3,128]

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

[whitman 1,286]

The best reviews so far doesn't count on MC, what a pity

[ilovetati 15,295]

The best reviews so far doesn't count on MC, what a pity

 

The 100 from EW should be going up.

 

Also, what's with all of these publications referring to UV as "pop?" It's clearly alternative/psychedelic/chamber rock with elements of baroque pop. It's interesting that any female singer with this sound has to claw her way out of the pop label while male artists often experience the opposite. (Case-in-point: Linkin Park still being considered rock). 

[Lad 8,795]

Is that review talking about this photoshopped pic?

 

[MandyLou 3]

If you have haters you must be doing something right.

[naachoboy 7,977]

The best reviews so far doesn't count on MC, what a pity

the best one is a 100 and it counts. 

[ilovetati 15,295]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-review-lana-del-rey-ultraviolence-20140613-column.html

 

3/4 from LA Times. Reads more like a 3.5 or 4, but I'll take it. 75/100 on MetaCritic. 

[naachoboy 7,977]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-review-lana-del-rey-ultraviolence-20140613-column.html

 

3/4 from LA Times. Reads more like a 3.5 or 4, but I'll take it. 75/100 on MetaCritic. 

yeah weird :/ 

[rdp 1,240]

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

 

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

Lmao @ the first paragraph.  The reviewer sounds dumb as fuck.

[ilovetati 15,295]

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.