Lana Del Rey’s sixth album, Norman F*****g Rockwell!, explores the double-sidedness of American nostalgia through compelling and knowing songs about torrid relationships, self-destructive addictions, and historic places overloaded with meanings both cultural and personal. NFR! sounds like a classic analog studio production, evoking Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, with vocal overdubs, clean acoustic instruments and synths. Jack Antonoff, who has previously worked with Lorde and Taylor Swift, produced this album and the result is sonically polished and coherent, giving the songs a feeling of being rooted in a particular place and time. The album art is similarly situated, looking like a cross between a preppy clothing line catalogue and an ironic Pop Art commentary on the same advertising.

 

The songs themselves are unhurried but composed, given to occasional length as an expression of a mood more than a resolution. “Venice B*tch,” the third song on the album and a standout early single, exemplifies this tendency with it’s near ten-minute running time and the noodling synth and guitar lines playing out over its final minutes. The song’s lyrics reference 60’s pop music (“Crimson and Clover”), Norman Rockwell, and the poet Robert Frost in a sketch of lost or losing love. The prevalent feeling on this song and the two that precede it is a sense of loss, as Del Rey’s lyrics move from missing a person or a feeling to one’s youth. The opening track, “Norman F***ing Rockwell,” is equally referential, drawing on Joni Mitchell and the Laurel Canyon scene of the 70’s to tell the story of a relationship with a pretentious poet “man-child.”

 

Other songs on NFR! explore familiar territory for longtime fans of Lana Del Rey such as the pursuit of oblivion through various drugs, the multiple forms that sadness can take, and the precarious status of women in romantic relationships with men. One of the excellent singles from the album is a cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time,” which highlights the misogyny of the original performance when the lyrics are no longer sung by a man. The closing ballad, “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but I have it,” is a companion piece of sorts to this cover, repeating its title in the chorus but ending with ambiguity about the scope of those particular politics. Yet, if Del Rey’s feminism is hard to pin down, her commitment to recovery is admirable and exemplary on the songs “How to Disappear” and “Bartender.” Both songs acknowledge how people use drugs to cope with the pain in their lives, while showing lives that continue with pain faced directly and acknowledged. In the end, these songs seem to express a central insight of the album, that the tools and stories we use to survive can both cure and harm us but we have to decide how to manage that treatment.

 

In addition to CD, NFR! is available on hoopla.

 

Joseph

Vanessa

7 is available on Freegal.

Bon Iver’s fourth album, “i,i,” opens with a sample of static, chopped vocals, and the hard to hear question, “Are you recording?” hinting at the improvised and layered nature of the thirteen tracks that make up the running time. That brief introductory track, “Yi,” segues into the wildly ornate “iMi,” a clearer indication of the album. According to Justin Vernon, the chief vocalist and current musical director of sorts in Bon Iver, “iMi” is the result of five years of composition and rearrangement, with the album’s opening metallic sawing sample of radio static and questions forming the oldest layer upon which programmed drums, vocals both clean and pitch-shifted, as well as horns are brought together to create a kind of pop music that feels both contemporary and forward-looking.

 

The structure of “iMi” is generally true for the whole album, as “i,i” is a collection of dense and anxious music that never lets the listener rest in one place or mood for too long, though it flows together as a series of moments and iterations stitched together for amplification and echo. The overall feeling of the album is a sense of bracing and fragmented immediacy, a series of moods captured in the present and then filtered and made into composites. Album highlights like “Holyfields,” and “Jelmore” evoke our ongoing climate crisis. Vernon sings on the former, “The dawn is rising/The land ain’t rising,” alluding to rising sea levels; on the latter, he asks the listener, “How long/will you disregard the heat?” The lyrics that surround these moments of political clarity show their improvisational origins more clearly, muddying any message, if indeed it was intended in the first place.

 

Other fixable but difficult political and social ills like poverty and homelessness are addressed on notable songs like “U (Man Like),” a collective effort between the band, Bruce Hornsby, Jenn Wasner, and Moses Sumney, who all contributed vocals and lyrics to the piano-driven track. The second verse, sung by Hornsby, Sumney, Vernon, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in turn, captures a sense of concern as well as paralysis: “Well, I know that we set off for a common place/And the lines have run too deep/How much caring is there of some American love/When there’s lovers sleeping in the streets.” It’s hard to hear this and not agree with it, yet the sentiment feels so general as to be insufficient to the enormity of the situation it addresses. However, this is pop music not a policy proposal.

 

The album isn’t all chopped and muddy bleakness. Several songs offer glimmers of hope and strange images of beauty to be recovered in the present. “Naeem,” another standout track whose chorus repeatedly states “I can hear crying,” resolves around this defiant post-human image: “Tell them I’ll be passing on/Tell them we’re young mastodons/And it can’t be that it’s all/And it can’t be that’s all.” I take these lines to mean that such a dire state of affairs has been the general pattern, and yet life (human or otherwise) endures. On the closing track “RABi,” Vernon finds joy in companionship with others in the midst of trials shared on Earth. The chorus of the song rejects the idea of salvation or a life after death, finding heaven in sunlight shared between us: “So what of this release?/Sun light feels good now, don’t it?/And I don’t have a leaving plan/But something’s gotta ease your mind/But it’s all fine or it’s all crime anyway.” The production is striking here, as the guitar and vocals are dominant in the mix and presented cleanly with little processing, evoking the feeling of clouds parting or the sun rising and leaving us to go on our way. Or, as the album’s last line puts it, “But if you wait, it won’t be undone.”

 

Joseph

Vanessa