Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Young Turks
2.
FKA twigs: MAGDALENE
FKA twigs’ second album plays like an unsparing breakup manual for a distant species, some glamorous alien race presumably as brilliant at everything as she is: singing, producing, writing, dancing, seducing, exorcising, empathizing. MAGDALENE is an overwhelming collection of intimacies, a generous feat of communication that turns her specific pain (not all of us have to get over a breakup with a celluloid vampire) into communion.
For all the clever syntheses in MAGDALENE’s production—polyphonic vocals wisping over bass shudders; operatic trills distorted into grisly yelps—twigs is desperately clear in her words. Over the alluring trap beat of “holy terrain,” she asks coyly for fidelity, nervous and brave in her open-heartedness. Part the waves of distortion on “home with you,” and she is wailing, gorgeously, at the injustice of emotional abandonment. And on the exquisite centerpiece “cellophane,” she is as exposed, fallen, and overwhelmed as the album’s namesake. But unlike Mary Magdalene, twigs can reclaim her narrative, in this act of graceful assertion that makes the agony of her love heroic. –Stacey Anderson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Interscope
1.
Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell!
After eight years, five albums, and complete political and cultural upheaval, Lana Del Rey has risen to her greatest musical heights. When she first crash-landed into the public consciousness in 2011, breathily cooing about video games and blue jeans, the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant was engulfed in heated debates over her authenticity, whether or not she was in control of her creative output, and whether she deserved her success at all. (As if the Bowies and Madonnas of the world didn’t spend decades proving that an artist’s greatest triumphs can come from reinvention.) But she ignored the haters and plowed forward, steadily carving out her own dark corner of the pop landscape. Norman Fucking Rockwell! takes that journey one step further: It cements Del Rey as a newly emergent Great American Songwriter.
The elements of the Lana Del Rey Cinematic Universe, as established in the Born to Die era, have remained consistent throughout her discography: Lynchian dreamscapes of haunted prom queens and suburban ennui, meditations on the death of the American Dream, Old Hollywood glamour, the agony and ecstasy of bad men, references to classic rock and Comp Lit 101. On Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her songwriting at last goes toe-to-toe with the grandeur of her ideas. Her lyrics are dense poems destined for academic scrutiny, anchored by the kind of dry wit that could come as easily from the pen of Dorothy Parker as from a really good Instagram caption. Del Rey’s attitude towards destructive relationships take a refreshing turn, giving her more agency than ever before: “You’re fun and you’re wild/But you don’t know the half of the shit that you put me through/Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news,” she sings wearily on the title track. “’Cause you’re just a man/It’s just what you do.” (Because the reality of loving a fast-living, leather jacket-clad Romeo on a motorcycle is that you also have to deal with his bullshit.) Later, on “Venice Bitch,” she’s “fresh out of fucks forever,” like so many of us aspire to be. On “The Greatest,” she takes a widescreen look at our planet, sighing into the void as climate change brings about a hellish endless summer.
Del Rey’s melodies also find their ideal setting in producer Jack Antonoff’s airy Laurel Canyon psych-folk, where she follows in the lineage of Joni Mitchell and Carole King. Untethered from the electronic pop and hip-hop trappings of many of her previous songs, her vocals breathe deep and her melodies luxuriate. Nothing here aims anywhere near the top 40; to paraphrase Del Rey’s buddy Kacey Musgraves, she’s classic in the right way.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an album that arrived feeling like a greatest hits collection. Future generations will marvel that one album contained “Venice Bitch” and “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it.” And they will scoff in disbelief that Lana Del Rey was once treated as anything but the poet laureate of a world on fire. –Amy Phillips
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
