Her 2014 Ultraviolence used to be her best album (by a mile) until now - the one where her singing and songwriting finally caught up with her myth-making flair. “The Bartender,” “How To Disappear,” “Love Song” - these are torch ballads that feel like they should be playing in the background of some lost Nineties straight-to-video erotic thriller, on a VHS tape buried in the attic of someone who hustled it from Blockbuster and died before paying the late fee.
She’s always the girl in the song, whatever song happens to be on the radio right now, but she’s also the girl singing the song, making it feel doomed and fucked up and yet somehow thrilling. But nobody can doubt this is Lana’s trip. She updates her original pose as the “gangster Nancy Sinatra,” with Jack Antonoff as her Lee Hazelwood, rising to the occasion as her musical wingman. The title ballad opens with the closest she comes to a romantic moment: “Goddamn, man-child/You fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you.’” (It evokes the deeply creepy moment on Honeymoon where she invites her lover to “kiss while we do it,” as if that’s some kind of esoteric perversion, which in her songs it is.) And the fact that this man-child fails her emotionally in every possible way? She shrugs, “You’re just a man / It’s just what you do / Your head in your hands as you color me blue.” (The late David Berman wrote that he was planning to call his Purple Mountains album Strangers in the Fucking Night until he heard about Lana’s title.) “Venice Bitch” was a nine-minute swirl of psychedelic guitar smog, lush strings and low-riding G-funk synths, with Lana baring her fangs, declaring herself “fresh out of fucks forever.” “Mariners Apartment Complex” was a ballad of flesh-and-blood heartbreak, pleading, “Jesus, can’t a girl just do the best she can?” Last week, the one-two punch of “Fuck It I Love You” and “The Greatest” raised expectations to a fever pitch.īut the album exceeds them, stretching the languid groove for over an hour. Norman Fucking Rockwell was iconic before it was even released, with the string of brilliant singles Lana has rolled out over the past year as her song-by-song diary, not to mention that magnificent title.
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