Lana del Rey, Elton John, Parquet Courts, Circiut des Yeux, Grouper: Abgehört

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Musician Lana del Rey

Photo:

Neil Krug / Universal Music

Album of the week:

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Album cover of "Blue Banisters"

Not only as an overworked pop critic you want to call out to many artists these days: It's nice that you were all so incredibly creative in lockdown, but heaven, ONE album per year is enough! This applies in particular to the US singer Lana del Rey, who only released the excellent "Chemtrails Over The Country Club" in March. With that she had really shown it to all of her numerous critics, but, sigh, shortly afterwards the 36-year-old Americana pop songwriter announced the next album, which should be released on July 4th, Independence Day, Blockbuster Day.

Lana lured on Instagram: Anyone interested in her true, real story can be happy, because her eighth record is about nothing else. And now "Blue Banisters" is finally here, several months late. Honestly, you didn't necessarily wait for it. After all, nothing is more boring than when a pop artist who has so far had a very good career with nostalgically obscured, darkly romantic prose, suddenly wants to turn to authenticity. Or even revenge your squabbles with the press? Should "Blue Banisters" be a battle rap album?

Fortunately, it was all just a deception. The all-clear: Little is a revelation here, at least three songs are even from 2012, she once wrote them with her ex-boyfriend Barrie James O'Neill, but then found no use for them. Until they landed on this junk-filled leftover ramp.

However, it is pleasant that Jack Antonoff did not have his busy producer fingers in the game this time. Recently there was allegedly a bit of an upset between Lana and her colleague Lorde, who was also looked after by Antonoff, about certain melodic similarities between the songs of the two. Now Arctic Monkeys producer Zach Dawes and Mike Dean (including Kanye West) were working on the songs. However, they didn't have to do much more than a rushing noise here, or turning in a few soft strings there: One reduced, musically not very interesting, but provocatively slow-motion piano ballad follows the next, and every now and then there's a guitar ballad with a bit of country twang, then again, right, a piano ballad. Everything wants to appear more mysterious and pregnant with meaning than it really is.

Do the lyrics at least keep what Lana promised?

Yes and no.

Unapologetically, she continues to romanticize those young boys - one with a Ford Thunderbird ("Textbook"), another with alcohol or drug problems ("Dealer", "Thunder") - who once bitterly disappointed her or treated her badly.

Some things are very beautiful and lyrical, for example when Del Rey breathes into an almost perfect pop refrain in “Violets For Roses”: “God knows the only mistake that a man can make / Is tryin 'to make a woman change and trade her violets for roses «.

Do you prefer violets to roses?

Everyone can make up their own mind on this.

Lana Del Rey lives the blues and paints her world blue, even the railings of her porch in the title song.

Tribulation as an attitude towards life, that's nice.

Lana believes that many people get it wrong somehow, which is why she sometimes presses a little too hard on the tube in all the blue painting.

In the key piece "Beautiful", for example, she compares herself to Picasso.

Imagine if someone had forbidden the old, beastly master to be sad, she explains in the text, maybe then there would never have been his "blue phase"!

So one shouldn't shake their melancholy either.

"Lets keep it simple, babe / Don't make me complicated / Don't tell me to be glad when I'm sad," she sings.

And: "Let me show you how sadness can turn into happiness / I can turn blue into something".

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Lana del Rey

Blue Banisters

Label: Universal Urban

Label: Universal Urban

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"Have a smile", the ultimate trigger phrase for feminists, is probably a reason for separating them,

.

It is all the more astonishing to see her laughing completely relaxed in the video clips for “Blue Banisters” and “Arcadia” - such a rare impression of Lana Del Rey that it almost comes as a shock.

Speaking of shock: the singer has already experimented charmingly with her voice on »chemtrails«, but now she's also taking it a bit far when the singing in the already strangely stumbled »Black Bathing Suit« suddenly drones terribly - although she just claimed to sing like an angel.

With their no less irritating howling in "Thunder" you would like to cover your ears.

Maybe an ironic greeting to her two dogs Tex and Mex, with whom she poses on the record cover?

Oh, what do you know.

Not much more than before about this consistently challenging artist.

And that's maybe the best that can be said about their unnecessary new album.

(5.5)

Listened briefly:

Elton John - "The Lockdown Sessions"

A cover version of the battered “Nothing Else Matters” by pop brat Miley Cyrus, star cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and, well, Elton John (who is next to Cyrus' Tube barely can be heard) sounds just as exhausting as it reads here. And the “It's A Sin” remake with Years & Years is also a sin, “Cold Heart” sacrifices “Sacrifice” and “Rocket Man” with Dua Lipa on the disco altar. It gets involuntarily funny at the dumpling duels with Eddie Vedder or Stevie Nicks: "I looove like a stolen car"? What does it even mean? As you can see, the dearly meant "lockdown sessions" that 74-year-old Sir Reginald stuck together with rap stars like Lil Nas X or Nicki Minaj as well as high-ranking pop and rock greats by remote control should be enjoyed with caution.The very first duet between Elton John and Stevie Wonder in the exuberant soul of "Finish Line" has to be disarming. And also the commitment to the diverse, self-chosen friendship family with Rina Sawayama ("Chosen Family") touches. But ... phew. (3.0)

Parquet Courts - "Sympathy For Life"

"How many ways to feel lousy have I found in New York?" Lost overview.

The Parquet Courts in "Walking at a Downtown Pace" never sounded like this to themselves, firmly installed in a euphoric fatalism groove and annoyed big city grumbling about gentrification.

The lively post-punk anthem opens the seventh album by the Brooklyn band and sets the usual rumble rhythm.

But there is also room for experiments: “Marathon of Anger” or “Plant Life” with electro-dub and afrobeat reach for the talking heads, where the agitprop funk punk of Primal Scream is usually the inspiration.

Fortunately not a lockdown album, but rather impulsive, electrifying energy shots that put you back on the right foot (or deadlock, depending on).

(7.7)

Circuit des Yeux - "-io"

Attention, pop didactics: For those who, after six albums and two country experiments as Jackie Lynn, still cannot remember how the French artist name of the US musician Haley Fohr is pronounced, she gives a spoken instruction in the booklet ( »Sir-CUT Deh-z y-uu«), linked to instructions for the right listening experience of their enormous chamber pop album »-io«: scented candle on, curtains closed, it's best to stay alone and stare at the ceiling when Fohr plays with deeply dramatic baritone Voice sings about winter preparations or the disappearance (»Vanishing«). It's even harder, more operatic, more depressive stuff than their last album “Reaching For Indigo”, and that was extreme. She dealt intensively with black holes in the lockdown, says Fohr,Her treatises on the ultimate things, written for orchestra, have correspondingly much gravitas and suction power. No wonder that she advises to take a break after the middle piece "Sculpting The Exodus", which swells to the greatest desperation with strings and Wagner choirs, because her opus Magnum, which sometimes just misses the kitsch, is finally "a novel, not a movie". The very, very dark side of the moon. (8.2)

Grouper - "Shade"

The ghostly, beguiling music by Liz Harris alias Grouper sounds on her twelfth album as if the bluish pop muse Lana Del Rey (see above) had engaged in a session with the slowcore artists from Low, who you now feel very much distant future, heard on a badly preserved tape - or in a radio broadcast floating in the air, one often hears Harris' voice under all the noise and reverberation. The Californian sings anyway so softly and enraptured that you have to feel the content of the lyrics. The songs that she wrote over the last 15 years, which are arranged with guitar and sounds, are about the mutually forming relationship of bodies and biographies with the landscape, says Harris - especially with the Pacific coast, where she lives herself. When listening you feelas if one were gradually and gently called back to this world from the greatest self-absorption and isolation, the shadowy realm of the soul. (7.9)