A- Lana Del Rey
Ultraviolence
Interscope
Moody and dark, tinged with retro reverb and drones and permeated with desire, Lana Del Rey's seductive new songs may take a little patience as her unique pop music vision unfolds.
She sounds inebriated with desire ... for love, sex, money. But satisfaction and happiness are elusive, the truce is uneasy. Del Rey's voice and the music have a melancholy tone with an underlying tension that wraps around the men and women in the songs. As she sings of love and rejection, it is clear winning isn't everything it's cracked up to be; perception and reality may or may not meet.
Del Rey's songs lay bare realities and risks; the irresistibility of the siren's call in the face of physical and emotional desire; the subtle and not-so-subtle truths and consequences.
Dan Auerbach's gorgeous production works with Rey as it builds up a noir-esque sense of foreboding and excitement, a promise of thrills with heartbreak to follow ... or worse. It's a soft but not gentle approach that underscores melodrama with strings and seasons arrangements with languorous rhythms and guitar textures that sound '50s one moment, futuristic the next.
Del Rey's emotional, confident voice gives Ultraviolence (the title references A Clockwork Orange) cohesion. The first single, "West Coast," debuted in the Top 20; she reached No. 6 in Billboard in 2013 with a remix of "Summertime Sadness" from her Born to Die album.
This is the work of a singular talent who sounds like no one else, and that's a very good thing.
Hot tracks: "Cruel World," "Pretty When You Cry," "West Coast," "The Other Woman."
-- ELLIS WIDNER
A- Sam Smith
In the Lonely Hour
Capitol
Sam Smith's voice is too special to be denied -- bluesy one minute, soulful the next, moving effortlessly from fluttering falsetto to commanding pop.
Smith initially made his splash on a pair of dance hits -- Naughty Boy's "La La La" and Disclosure's "Latch" -- and many were expecting more of the same. However, aside from the opener, "Money on My Mind," where Smith declares, "I have no money on my mind, just love" when it comes to making music, the dance beats are scarce. Instead, Smith serves up an emotional, ballad-heavy pop album.
"Leave Your Lover" packs the same emotional wallop as Adele's simpler ballads, while "I'm Not the Only One" picks up the tempo and the mood slightly. On the spare "Not in That Way," driven by a single guitar and his soaring vocals, Smith's ache over his unrequited love is wrenching.
Stripping "Lay Me Down" of the more electronic opening it had as a single and slowing it down may make it slightly less interesting musically, but it also makes it a much more effective love song.
Hot tracks: "Leave Your Lover," "Lay Me Down," "I'm Not the Only One."
-- GLENN GAMBOA
Newsday
B+ Neil Young
A Letter Home
Reprise
The story here is the process, an honest and sincere rendering of 11 old songs that matter to the singer directly onto producer Jack White's lo-fi Voice-O-Graph recording booth in Nashville, which dispenses an instant vinyl record, while applying a kind of Instagram patina -- hisses, pops and the warm distortion -- that record lovers swear by.
It's a charming, innocent and utterly nonessential product that's good to listen to, although we could have done without the spoken word "letter home" interludes where Neil pretends he has just recorded the songs for his mom, just like Elvis Presley did for his mother, Gladys. While the song selection occasionally veers toward ordinary and trite -- Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain," Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe" -- Young delivers heart-crushing versions of Bert Jansch's little-known "Needle of Death" and Springsteen's "My Hometown."
While I might have preferred it without the old-timey effects (if you pay extra for the boxed set version, you can have these "clean" versions too), it's an interesting experiment -- another for Old Neil's curiosity shoppe.
Hot tracks: "Needle of Death", "My Hometown," the Everly Brothers' "I Wonder If I Care as Much" with White on harmony.
-- PHILIP MARTIN
B+ Willie Nelson
Band of Brothers
Legacy
For the first time in years, Willie Nelson has written a majority of the songs on an album.
It's a mostly reflective mood he's sharing, but no quarter is given by the 81-year-old singer-songwriter. The first tune, "Bring It On," makes that point clear: "They say there is no gain without pain/Well I must be gaining a lot/And I'll give it all that I've got." Regrets? Maybe, as he sings in "The Wall" about his mistakes and excesses and the consequences.
It is about love, though, where Nelson excels. "I Thought I Left You" may be one of his very best, a sharp ballad imbued with barely contained anger about a contentious breakup, and then there's the hushed, wounded delivery of "Send Me a Picture." But Nelson has not forgotten how to laugh -- "Used to Her" is a kiss-off as he laments "I could have picked a woman who did not crave other men."
Band of Brothers mostly is in this "September of My Years," rear-view mirror viewpoint. And it makes this one of Nelson's strongest collections in some time.
Hot tracks: "Bring It On," "I Thought I Left You," "Used to Her," "The Wall."
-- ELLIS WIDNER
B+ May the Peace of the Sea Be With You
Storm Toss Big Bath
Self-released
A few months back a co-worker came in raving about this Fayetteville band he'd just heard on KABF-FM, 88.3, Little Rock's public radio station. He gave me the name, which is longer than most albums, and we searched around online, coming up with a Bandcamp page and an EP from 2012 called Spring Break.
The creaking, rambling, whacked-out tracks were immediately fetching, bringing to mind a sort of jam-band mixture of Pavement and Built to Spill, with maybe a little Modest Mouse thrown in, all birthed in some Ozark holler. The band called it "... grunge, nautical rock." Sounds about right to us.
May the Peace of the Sea Be With You has now offered up another four-song EP -- this one called Storm Toss Big Bath -- of similarly shambolic jams, with Christopher Columbus references, a fuzzed-up country jangle and appropriately eccentric lyrics. It's another hoot of a collection and is curiously addictive.
The band wraps up its latest tour with several shows around the state this week, beginning with a set Wednesday at Deluca's in Hot Springs, as part of a four-band bill Thursday at Little Rock's White Water Tavern and a Friday set at JR's Lightbulb Club in Fayetteville.
Show details and a download of Storm Toss Big Bath can be found at peaceofthesea.bandcamp.com.
Hot tracks:: "You'll Sail Right Off the Edge," "First Blood Pt. 2."
-- SEAN CLANCY
Style on 07/01/2014