Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots

I have this theory that most artists who get gushed about like they're something real special earn such gushing because they've made so much good stuff that to even call yourself a "fan" of theirs is too broad a term. It's obviously easier for people to praise something that's too large for them to even see in its entirety. Damon Albarn already qualified for such praise because of his double combo punch of Blur and The Guerrillas, and now making his name from his solo work, Albarn's become such a broad entity that he can't even be described as this type of artist or that. Which is also a way of saying that not being a fan of his previous bands (I wouldn't describe myself as one) shouldn't put you off giving Everyday Robots a spin.

The fact that Albarn's turned out to be a crank shouldn't be that surprising (doesn't everyone?), although the only reason his cynicism doesn't ruin the whole album is that he seems to know how old the whole fear-the-future thing is. The lyrics are all Kubrickian-style future warnings, only for the future we're all living in right now. It would be enough to say that Albarn's ran out of ideas and is just complaining for the sake of complaining if his misery over all of us internet obsessed, technology-for-happiness, TV whore robots wasn't so consistent - just look at some of the lyrics (all from different songs):

We are everyday robots on our phones/In the process of getting home

Hoping to find the key/To this play of communications/Between you and me 

When I'm lonely, I press play

When the photographs you're taking now are taken down again/When the heavy clouds that hide the sun are gone

It all sounds a bit depressing in theory, although just look at that last example: comparing the pictures on your Facebook to clouds stopping you from seeing the sun. There's a romance to the whole album. It's like an acceptance that technology's already corrupted us all and it's here to stay so the best someone like Albarn could do now is salvage some playful tunes from the rubble. Radiohead might have made a similar album in the late 90s if they'd cared more about the music than the message - sadly they didn't (still don't - even more so now); Albarn does.

The music here is slow; backing tracks built on slushy, mellow beats. The sort of tracks you can't quickly dash on to see if you like them or not because they offer no immediate satisfaction - the arrangements are slowly building beats which only really work when looked at as part of a three, four minute long track. Seven minute track You and Me brings to mind The Stone Roses, who were great at building funky, endlessly repeating rhythms that worked (where most artists struggle the most) in longer tracks. The best track is Mr Tempo, so out of place optimistic it sounds like a digitized Bob Marley reborn on the internet, it even has the sort of simplistic, just-happy-to-be-alive type rhyme at its center that Marley would have given us: "Mr. Tempo is on his way up the hill/With only this song to tell you how he feels/But to get there he will need a helping hand/It's where he is now but it wasn't what he planned". It's a sign that Albarn's too big in scope for any of us to see him whole, and third career around he's still the best at whatever it is exactly he's doing.

Lana Del Ray - Ultraviolence

Lana Del Ray's last album, her second (first, as far as most are concerned) got her a lot of fans because of its melodramatic production. It sounded what I imagine an angsty fourteen year old would picture as the perfect soundtrack to a dramatic movie, which is probably the reason I've never managed to listen to it all the way through. But it brought her into the mainstream: the same woman who was name dropping Kurt Cobain as a key influence in interviews was being placed on radio line-ups alongside Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj etc. The fact that Ultraviolence doesn't paint her as a 'tortured pop diva' but is moody and introspective, is both much more fitting a skin for Lana and also very likely to piss off a lot of the people who bought her first album: I've already seen crazed fans denounce Ultraviolence like it never happened.

I guess it's one of the virtues of not being a crazed fan then that I could listen to Ultraviolence for what it is, while also not exactly going ga ga over it. What it is is a 'personal album' in the same style as Frank Ocean's and Lorde's most recent releases: slow paced, meandering, bass heavy mood pieces that back up mostly self-questioning lyrics. All three of these albums sound like a wall of sound crashing through the speakers, stopping one from calling this music 'minimalistic' - although the compositions are simple enough that you focus entirely on the lyrics. Which is obviously the point: here is three artists in control of their albums, or at least making the producers calling the shots seem more invisible than usual.

Yet both Ocean and Lorde sold themselves on having unique personalities inside their genres - their stripped down albums, getting up close with the artists, was exactly what their fans wanted. Del-Ray doesn't invoke the same excitement on her own, which is probably why the best moments on Ultraviolence are the most self-obsessed. Highlights sound like angrily scribbled diary entries. Take the lyrics of Brooklyn Baby:

Well, my boyfriend's in a band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed

 I've got feathers in my hair/I get down to Beat poetry

And my jazz collection's rare/I can play most anything

 I'm a Brooklyn baby/I'm a Brooklyn baby 

I'd slant most singers for such self-indulgence but for Lana it seems like her biggest selling point. All of her vocals sound hollow and dampened under a veil of production, a risky move for a singer who's most noticeable virtue has been her melodramatic choruses. The whole thing shouldn't work actually, but managing to hold the mood for the entire album creates a space in which all tracks make sense, even if most are worthless on their own.

Obvious miscalculations: a song that takes a sarcastic jab at some well known rumors about the singer titled Fucked My Way Up To The Top and a purposefully self-obsessed piece of boasting titled Money Power Glory which I imagine Lana expected to work out as a Kanye-style ego examination; both jokes that (because they both come in the middle of an album that spends its time creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that includes no fun or adventurousness) don't land. Actually most tracks don't land, they only hold up the mood which Lana wants to convey. Ultraviolence doesn't make a showcase of Lana Del-Ray's talents, only shows what talents it is she wants to possess.