This is a huge problem.
Three days ago I purchased Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. I started reading reviews while it was downloading and I got hooked. The reviews are all over the map, it’s insane. I still haven’t listened to the album… maybe tomorrow? Reading the reviews is too much fun.
eMusic - “This 12-song justification-of-sorts is a pop album, and perhaps a too-quickly-crafted one at that.”
Pitchfork - “You’d be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire”
RollingStone - “But her voice is pinched and prim, and her song doctors need to go the fuck back to med school.”
The AV Club - “Shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha’s Valley Girl aloofness, the album lives down to the harshest preconceptions against pop music.”
The NY Times - “This is album as anticlimax, the period that ends the essay, not the beginning of a new paragraph.”
Paste - “Lana reminds me of whomever the last artist was that that I felt compelled to play 76 times in a month and sing all the time because their melodies were in my head all the time.”
Telegraph - “Born to Die often sounds like some great lost soundtrack to LA Confidential.”
BBC - If that sounds knowing that’s because it is, not to mention intelligent, ambitious, and more interesting than anything Adele is likely to write even by the time her inevitable 72 collection hits the shelves of the future.
Oh, and almost every review used the word ‘trip-hop’ to describe the music. Only Paste and The Telegraph didn’t.
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A Boy And His Frog - by Tom Smith
They say, “Oh, that’s just foam and a wire,
Attached to a green velvet sleeve,
Anyone can do that” — well, that’s true, I suppose,
But who else could make them believe?
This is one of those songs that really gets me choked up. Full lyrics at Tom Smith Online. You can also read about how the song came to exist:
When Mr. Henson died, I had to do something — and I had to do it quickly, because MarCon was in three days. In a fitting burst of weirdness, this song was written on The Steps at the MarCon hotel, … I went back up to the hotel room, sang it until I could sing it twice without breaking down, then did my concert, and broke down anyway. That was my first standing ovation.
Fun. (feat. Janelle Monáe) “We Are Young”
God damn this song is so good. Song of the fall (Is that a thing? It should be).
What’s up with the white balance shift at :45 in the music video though?
Fuck. This song is so damn good. It’s been in my head all day and show’s no sign of leaving.
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Black and yellow, black and yellow, black and yellow, black and yellow.
(in my mind this is a song about Batman. These are the only lyrics I know)
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I may be a little late to the party on this, but I’m really enjoying the New Pornographers album Together. Give it a listen. It’s worth your time.
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This song has been in my head since yesterday… I have no idea why.
