For its official runtime, however, Ultraviolence runs on sure sturdy rails, so far as its narrative and stages of grief are concerned.īorn To Die was an unforeseen pop songstress bleeding the zeitgeist dry Ultraviolence is her dedication to “the freedomland of the 70s,” a decade for which she wasn’t even alive. There’s but one misstep via the incongruous “Florida Kilos” and its “yayo, yayo” hook. In her recent interviews, Lana’s insisted that her narrative ends at track eleven, her saloon-sway cover of Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman.” The rendition is a tad rote but brief, leading into the exhausted wisdom of “Black Beauty,” the strong first of four bonus tracks. “They say I’m too dumb to see.” (“sing”?) “They judge me like a picture book: / by the colors, like they forgot to read.” The paranoia and abandon of “Sad Girl” and “Pretty When You Cry" is followed by the dry-eyed sarcasm of “Money Power Glory.” Tracking to Lana's sway from lover to fighter to blue again, there's a clear melodic bridge between the title track and “Fucked My Way Up To the Top,” a wondrously petty anthem that’s Ultraviolence’s rightful orgasm. “Brooklyn Baby,” the latest single, is duly aware and effacing in its naive celebration of beat poetry, hydroponic weed, and updo feathers there’s goo-goo, gaa-gaa on the track in case you weren’t sure. As trollish as the track titles suggest, the album is confrontational, empowered piss-taking. Alternatively, homegirl is Dorothy Parker, a wit despite heartbreak and despair. Lana’s blues is hubris, scorn, booze, love, infatuation repeat. This is the Marlboro-smoky backseat of a joyride that’s somehow turned to fists and tears Ultraviolence is drunk driving. The album, more intimate than its predecessor, serializes an avid lover’s struggles with money, trust, expectations, and Other Women. Ultraviolence is a blues affair, with moody innuendo spilling bloody and bold as the opening sequence to a vintage Bond saga. “West Coast,” the first single, warps time, space, and sobriety with a bit of time signature funkery a la Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song.” Beyond California, Ultraviolence longs for retreat and return to Las Vegas and Detroit, a nostalgia that’s not quite pointless or for its own sake: that mid-century glory has run its course, the past is dead, love is dead, everything dies, the end. Her voice blossoms but never without wilting thereafter. This time around, lead Black Keys virtuoso Dan Auerbach steers Lana from the late-’80s break beats and Kanye-ripe samples of Born to Die, to this desert soundscape, where real guitars twang, where real drums buckle and thrash. And given the common critical derision of her aggressive pop aspiration and brash songwriting on Born to Die, surely she's savoring her evident creative growth as a sort of revenge.
Luckily, she's adored by that very same generation of Tumblr gods and goddesses who launched her stardom in 2012, on the strength of her Interscope debut single, "Video Games" and chaser hits "Blue Jeans" and "National Anthem." Two years later, Lana Del Rey is singing to a generation that's quietly anticipated her return to brooding form. It does not store any personal data.“The power of youth is on my mind,” is Lana Del Rey’s understatement, ten tracks deep, of her third album’s gist. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
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