Lana Del Rey is large – she contains multitudes, and the way she balances and embodies them on her fifth album is nothing short of stunning.
The 2019 version of Lana Del Rey, drifting through L.A. looking for love and meaning, is as awash in nostalgia as ever, but she’s more tongue-in-cheek and self-aware now.
The woman we call Lana Del Rey has always been a fantasy, an avatar, a mirror reflecting back what America wishes to see through her art. It’s just never been as deliberate, succinct, and downright enjoyable as now.
While much of her older material revelled in its own inconsolable sadness and detached numbness, the lush sonics and intimate narratives of NFR! draw out hope from beneath desolate scenes.
The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! feels like an album built to resist time – one of those songwriters’ records that could have been made whenever: Graceland, Blue, Tapestry.
Norman Fucking Rockwell is Lana Del Rey unfiltered, full of beauty, emotion, heartbreak, and devastation.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is nothing if not entertaining in that most Hollywood of ways. Hype or no, art or artifice, it’s nonetheless well worth the experience.
With Norman Fucking Rockwell ... she’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute.
The album is sultry and soporific, sitting somewhere between the minimalist trip-hop of Del Rey’s early days, and the scuzzy desert rock she has toyed with over the years.
Although on first listen it may appear inaccessible and tedious to some listeners due to its Californian themes and static aura, it marks itself as one of Lana’s most cohesive and constitutional albums.
Most of Norman Fucking Rockwell exists in some timeless, catgut-strewn place where 3am bar pianos and washes of keyboards serve as the tear-stained mat under Del Rey’s glass slipper of a voice.
Lana Del Rey improves as a songwriter by leaps and bounds on NFR.
She shows herself to be developing into one of America’s finest singer/songwriters, with both biting as well as humourous tongue-in-cheek commentaries, about the state of political and cultural chaos in the U.S.
By this point, she’s probably preaching to the converted, and won’t attract anyone previously immune to the Del Rey charm – yet this is probably her finest record since Born To Die.
This shows her refining that approach, adding a few new brush strokes here and there, but still providing a unique and fascinating tableau as a whole.
Unlike Del Rey’s past work, Norman Fucking Rockwell sees the singer walk the fine line between tragedy and comedy.
Del Rey’s Instagram filter-tinted malaise is her calling card, but on this album she jettisons any sonic sluggishness in favor of crisp, unadorned instrumentation: wistful piano, light horns and string accents, sighing guitar.
This is her best album yet, and great moments abound amidst the fat.
Listening to Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an alternately beguiling and frustrating experience.
Ultimately, Norman F----- Rockwell! reveals Del Rey to be something of a one trick pony, and the question for listeners is just how much they enjoy that trick.
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