Haim – Forever EP review
Haim are an immediately intriguing proposition. Three sisters (and a shadowy male drummer – a new Jim Corr in the making??), they first grabbed attention with their hitching of R&B beats to an image which suggests nothing more than the Smack the Pony team doing a Little Mouse of the Prairie sketch. Dig deeper, however, and you’ll find their debut EP is less momentarily diverting gimmick than impressively versatile showcase. It breathlessly leaps from one unlikely influence to the next, and has a way with a good tune that seems to come so easy it’s almost embarrassing.
Forever is three-tracks strong without a duffer in sight, and currently free on their website. ‘Better Off’ leads with playground a cappella harmonies before introducing the aforementioned biting urban production (recalling The Boxettes, recently featured in Fwaf’s Great Escape preview) and an intimidating message of intent – ‘You fucked me up, what am I to do now?’ ‘Forever’ features some zealous percussion and a wired, slightly off-kilter pop feel that’s reminiscent of Phoenix, while Go Slow has 90’s girl-group harmonies with 80’s girl-group studio-sheen and layers up in a wistful, ‘Army Dreamers’ era Kate Bush kind of way.
Amidst all this genre weirdness, the robust vocals give you something to hold on to. You may not have thought you wanted to know what Patti Smith circa Easter meets Taylor Swift would sound like, but the answer is here anyway, and it’s compelling: suggesting at once a truculent long-haul driver who’s somehow found herself singing breezy pop songs, and a Country-style hinterland of hard-times overcome by sheer grit, moxie and a readiness to eat squirrel. What’s more, the well-appointed running time of each song gives room for your imagination to limber into action, and they make sure to leave you in quite a different place to where you started. Unless you started in inner-city Squeaky Corner’s Way, obviously.
The Great Escape Festival 2012 – Review
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With civilization comes first-world problems. Unlike those whose festival of choice is, say, Glastonbury or Leeds, attendees of Brighton’s Great Escape don’t have to worry about waking up to find their tent doing its best Huckleberry Finn impression on a newly formed estuary, or smouldering on what is unlikely to be a properly licensed bonfire. But, being in a city, it seems the new music showcase/industry conference can’t shake the problems of the rat-race – meaning the possibility of lengthy commuting distances, staying glued to your smartphone for service updates and having to set-off early to avoid the rush. Yes, it’s an event at which the most carefully planned itinerary (assisted by the intuitive Great Escape app, the main function of which occasionally seemed to be to cruelly point out all the bands you didn’t stand a chance of seeing, but surely a mainstay of this kind of thing in the future) can quickly fall victim to the harsh realities of distance between venues, unannounced schedule changes and, of course, mammoth queues.
Initially setting-off with a relatively blasé approach, we quickly adjusted tactics after leaving a few songs into Shabazz Palaces set (ft. the most intense maraca playing I’ve ever seen) to catch the second half of Friends, only to be greeted by a soon-to-be-familiar re-buff of ‘one-in-one-out’. The following night, jaded from having to arrive an hour and a half early for Grimes (totally worth it, but still), our desire to be able to just walk in somewhere perhaps led us to play it overly safe, with Lianne La Havas and Rolo Tomassi enjoyable but not perhaps the most exciting options available. With no chance of seeing everyone, and a willingness to get there early a must for the more hotly-tipped acts, letting-go and surrendering to serendipity is the order of the day.
The over-riding atmosphere of the weekend is one of barely-shepherded chaos, but it undeniably creates a great buzz: Twitter is a hive of rumours, tips and a certain amount of misinformation about secret gigs and the chances of getting in somewhere at any one time. It also leads to a feeling of intrepidly making new discoveries, which, as the organisers would be quick to point out, is the whole idea. One of the performances of the festival for me came after having wandered into a pub expecting to see Fossil Collective and instead catching a spellbinding set from the apparently brand-new Lowpines: a male-female duo whose lo-fi Americana demands your full attention. Performing with sparse instrumentation – finger picked electric guitar, occasional bass, no drums – they delivered delicate, hushed harmonies and instantly memorable melodies. Artists at the head of growing momentum such as Cloud Nothings and Spoek Mathambo also delivered, the former frazzling a packed out crowd with their yelpy post-hardcore (an experience marred only by a patience-stretching monoto-jam that took over half their set), the latter giving a high-energy performance as he rapped and crooned over math-rock guitars, climaxing with a radical reworking of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’.
That’s not to say that the more ‘established’ acts disappointed, however. Grimes proved she is a star: hopping around in white-face paint in between a couple of zombie dancers, endearing even when realising the reason she couldn’t hear her keyboard was because she hadn’t turned it on (“Oh geez that was my fault”); Beth Jeans Houghton and The Hooves of Destiny again mystified as to why they aren’t bigger, combining playful operatic vocals with proper tunes; and EMA translated her atmospheric debut album into a commanding live-show, strutting and throwing angular poses to her band’s intoxicating drones as she felt every word of her emotional, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Perhaps most surprisingly, Mystery Jets gave a rousing set that improbably – given their ever-dwindling original line-up and status as one of the last bands standing of the early 2000s’ glut of indie-guitar acts – felt like a greatest hits victory-lap. They laced in several new songs, stand-outs of which were ‘The Hale Bop’, which saw them transform into Bee-Gees nodding disco stallions, and ‘Take Me Where the Roses Grow, where excellently-fringed Sophie Rose lent her impressive vocals to a sweet duet with guitarist William Rees.
Elsewhere the character of the respective venues shaped the performances as much as the bands themselves. Heading back into town en-route from watching Perfume Genius holding court in a reverb-drenched church with his short confessional audio sketches, we discovered a punk band bouncing off the walls of a laundrette, their singer gamely (but not particularly successfully, it must be said) trying to overcome a dead microphone with plain-old fashioned screaming. The Eagulls’ ferociously loud set on Friday evening was given an unruly, incongruous charm by its placement in what for all intents and purposes was a conference room – ‘The Sandringham Suite’ – of a faded glamour seafront hotel. The mix of their immensely watchable singer – whose all American looks and fevered stage persona (eyes clenched, head tilted up, stumbling back and forth) made me think of a skinny punk Dean Moriaty – with Hüsker Dü/Fucked Up style rolling distortion made them one of the acts of the weekend.
With everyone’s personal programme being marshalled by so many impossible to predict forces, it’s harder to pinpoint ‘bands of the festival’ than it is at more traditionally-situated events. Perhaps, then, it’s better to marvel at the quality on display in general: while a few bands passed by relatively anonymously, there was no one who actively stood out as bad. Given that it seemed to represent most genres in one form or the other (or even invent entirely new ones if the pictures of Trippple Nippples are anything to go by), that’s got to be something to celebrate.
Great Escape Festival 2012 preview
It’s the night before the sprawling, seaside festival that is The Great Escape lurches into action, and music venues all over Brighton are presumably busy putting up party bunting and making little sandwiches in preparation (that is what an urban festival is like, right?) In the spirit of helpfulness, Fwaf rolls up its sleeves and mucks in by revealing the fruits of months of intensive research into some of the lesser-known names you should be paying attention to. (Note: we definitely DID NOT just put the official Spotify playlist on random and review the first few things that played. That would be completely unprofessional.) Also, stay tuned for a review coming shortly.
The Boxettes – Hattie
This track by A Cappella group The Boxettes achieves the enviable feat of managing to recall both the Dirty Projectors and TLC at the same time, with sweet-yet-malice-laced female vocals coming together and tearing apart over spluttery beatboxing. Starting off on similar territory to one of The Unthanks surprisingly-grim folk chants, it takes an unexpected detour half-way into exploratory, quasi-spiritual vocal gymnastics. Bonus points for surely being the only song in history to be written about someone called ‘Hattie’. And for having swagger at that.
Husky – Hundred Dollar Suit
Country-tinged troubadours in the manner of The Villagers and Bright Eyes, whose vocalist inhabits an ostensibly small voice with poise and an edge of mischief in a similar way to the aforementioned acts. Add fun to their performance of this song by imagining it being introduced by Gob from Arrested Development.
Alby Daniels – New Dawn
The UK always seems slightly suspicious of the homegrown R’n’B loverman; we’re far more comfortable with our male singers in the cheeky-chappy mould of Olly Murs, or following the eunuch check-out boys of One Direction and their ilk. This is un-self-consciously sensual, but the dubby hush through which all the sonic caressing is filtered should be enough to dispel residual disquiet at the prospect of a cockney R. Kelly.
Keep Shelly in Athens – DIY
A track built around two hammering, brooding keyboard notes, which puts a slightly manic lilt on the low-key use of trumpet and cloistered, atmospheric vocals which follow. Added to the melodrama of the name (Is Shelly being kept in Athens for her benefit or ours??) and what you have here is intriguing, down-beat dance. Surely the best kind?
Com Truise – Ether Drift
One of those lazy spoonerific names, yes, but also angels playing 8-bit harps over some sharp low-end noodling. Fully 80s nostalgia, but done with such soft-top, shoulder-padded aplomb it’s difficult to care. What you have here is sunny, optimistic dance. Surely the best kind?
Misery loves Mulberry
As we’ve previously established here on Fwaf (see our hard-hitting treatment of Frank Ocean), glumness is synonymous with the intellectually edifying. What is perhaps more surprising, however, is that the saturnine is currently having a ‘moment’ amongst those of less high-minded interests. Yes, it seems that being sad isn’t only clever, it’s fabulous too. If, as Aristotle said, ‘to perceive is to suffer’, then the taste-makers of the world have worked out they can save us all some time by just presenting us with exclusively gloomy opuses in the first place. In demonstration of which, we call to the stand Daughn Gibson, with his excellent new single ‘Tiffany Lou’.
The cover is almost a one-shot synecdoche for this new aesthetic: black and white (naturally), it depicts an ‘oh, I didn’t see you there’ Daughn buttoning away a rugged chest in front of a seedy dressing-room mirror, brows furrowed in unforgiving appraisal of his mien. You can see the logic: Drake is currently being feted for managing to have ‘emotions’ at the same time as being a ‘man’ (which manifests via some whinnying about all that shagging he has to do), and the Pennsylvanian former-trucker seems to be suggesting he’s capable of a similar degree of post-coital reflectiveness, or at least consciousness. And If Lana Del Rey’s doomed pouting earns her a Mulberry handbag, then surely there’s a line of clutch purses with Daughn’s (admittedly hard to spell) name on it after this.
As for the music, much has been made of his James Blake-alike breaking-down-and-re-working-from-its-constituent-parts of the staples of the Country genre, like if the hurricane in the Wizard of Oz didn’t whisk Dorothy of into a Technicolor odyssey, but rather mashed up her grey Kansas dustbowl into a ghost-stricken dreamscape. Although The Earlies – early 2000s’ band composed of “musical pen pals” from Texas and Manchester – also seem like a relative reference point, in terms of ideas if not execution.
On ‘Tiffany Lou’ Daughn showcases his Ian Curtis style wet sandbag of a voice, as he croons over lugubrious samples of acoustic twanging, sustained piano chords and massively slowed down vocal dirges. At the chorus his voice catches suddenly and lifts upwards into a pretty, totally unintelligible lament, presumably for the lost-lady of the title. Though he could just as easily be saying ‘box car on a miffany moo’, or even just sighing melodically. Either way, the end result is as affecting as it is strange.
Recently Fwaf has been worried by a late-surge in favour of lightness of touch which looked like it might force a revaluation of the trope of the ‘happy idiot’– as Joss Whedon muddied the waters by releasing not one but two movies featuring scripts full of really rather clever non-sequitur gags to which the only sane reaction was to smile maniacally till the end credits started to roll. That’s why Gibson’s arrival on the scene is so timely, as it reaffirms our faith in a tradition that runs from The Smiths to Leonard Cohen right back to wise King Solomon, who lest we forget was prone to such charming ruminations as ‘there is nothing good under the sun, save for a man to be content in his work and die’. Now there’s a man who deserved his own handbag.
Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life
Given that title, the subject matter (it’s a documentary looking at death row inmates) and director Werner Herzog’s reputation as not one to shy away from the darker extremities of human nature, and you’d be forgiven that Into The Abyss might make for punishing viewing. But while it’s undeniably intense – as it should be – it’s what comes after the titular comma that sticks with you. For a film ostensibly about why we kill (‘we’ being both individuals and the state), it’s remarkably life affirming.
Focusing on the lasting toll of a triple homicide – on both its perpetrators and the famlies of their victims – and those who’s day-to-day involves watching people be put to death, he walks us through the mundane details of senseless crimes (Sandra Stotler was making cookies at the time she was murdered) and their unthinkable consequences, in doing so prompting comparisons to Capote’s In Cold Blood.
It’s true that in isolation it’s composed of parts we’ve seen many times before, starting with Herzog retracing the murders at the scene with the aid of one of the investigating officers. He later visits the convicted in prison and interviews the victims’ families surrounded by photos of their lost loved ones. But what may provide the driving thrust of other films is all context here. He’s not trying to solve, or even explain the crime; rather, he objectively confronts us with all its shattered pieces, in the belief that surely no one could do anything but balk at the horror of proceduralized execution when given enough pause to consider it properly, away from the noise of polemic.
Herzog lays out his stall near the beginning while speaking with Michael Perry – to paraphrase, ‘I don’t have to believe you, I don’t even have to like you, but I do think human beings should not be executed’. But there’s none of the hectoring, the baiting, the disingenuousness of, say, Michael Moore. And there’s certainly no prurient titillation as we wait for a mystery to be unravelled (that the accused are almost certainly guilty is revealed as almost as an incidental detail).
In many other hands so much here would seem ripe for parody – the soundtrack of swelling, minor-key strings; the slow tracking shot of a flock of birds breaking across a grey sky; the way the camera always lingers, often to the point of absurdity, on the interviewees after they’ve finished speaking, as if trying to impose a profundity onto a subject who looks more like they’re uncomfortably waiting for Herzog to say something else than contemplating the big questions. It’s amusing to imagine what the critical reaction would be if another director employed phrases like ‘ecstatic truth’ to explain their modus operandi.
But, for all of this, the film succeeds, largely because of one thing: its humanity. Herzog has an ability to feel real empathy for each of the people he encounters, rather than viewing them as a means to an end, a narrative cog to propel a story he’s already drawn-up. Anyone vaguely familiar with his work will know that he clearly cultivates an eccentric persona (which makes him incredibly easy to send-up) – but so what when it comes with a perspective, a style and of course, a voice which are so undeniably engrossing? Who else could disarm someone so completely by asking them to ‘describe an encounter with a squirrel’? And yet at the beginning of the film Herzog does just that to the pastor charged with holding the feet of men as they die, thereby breaking down what Herzog called his ‘Disney’-like prevarication and ultimately moving him to tears. But not once does it feel manipulative.
Speaking via satellite link up from the Gate Picturehouse in London after the showing I attended (at York’s City Screen) Herzog spoke of how he ‘fell in love’ with not one but two incidental characters (the former captain of ‘Death House’, Fred Allen, and a ‘working man’ friend of Jason Burkett), making them heroes of the tale based on the briefest of interactions. The truth, unlikely as it may seem, is that the man who pronounced ‘I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder’, who waves off insignificant bullets, is a sentimentalist at heart.
Like Dostoevsky in The Idiot, with this film Herzog imagines the terrible effect that the foreknowledge of death must have on a person (although here Dostoevsky was speaking from experience, having been subjected to a mock execution himself). But, also like the Russian author, he sees the flipside of this, with the new appreciation for life begat by being forced to confront its approaching absence (‘What if I didn’t have to die!…I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for’). Significantly, it’s this insight he chooses to end the film on, as Fred Allen speaks touchingly about his new found ability to appreciate the smaller things, having quit his job at the expense of his pension. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of the preceding 100 minutes that a sentiment which would normally appear trite through overuse seems to have gained new vigour. As you walk out of the cinema, don’t be surprised if you start to notice the birds that bit more, too.
Grimes – pop through misdirection
When first acquainted with Claire Boucher’s songs, with their busyness and propensity to proceed as the plastered crow flies to their destination, you may instinctively wonder why you’re not just listening to Roxette again (a valid question under any circumstances). Say what you will about the Swedish duo’s oeuvre, but they didn’t have any affectations about how pop worked: demonstrated, as forthrightly as ever, by naming their greatest hits album ‘Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus!’
Grimes is still pop, but forthright she ain’t. Delve further into Visions (or earlier albums Halfaxa and Geidi Primes) and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to enquire as to whether it’s all a bit overcooked: for instance, what that unintelligible celestial cooing is doing prancing about behind a perfectly catchy hook; if the background ambient meanderings really add anything to industrial urgency of the synths and percussion; that if it’s gothic oppressiveness she’s going for maybe she should’ve tried to glower up those impossibly honeyed, fey vocals.
But at a time when most charting-songs resemble an RPG in which glassy eyed sprites endlessly recycle the same few lines of dialogue back at you, or worse, politicos grimly determined to give a prepared soundbite, Grimes create fully furnished worlds. And like all convincing realities – the ones I’ve experienced at least – there’s extraneous, often inexplicable detail (or how else to explain the existence of Bill Turnbull?)
So what at first appears the random clatter of some modish bit of technology (let’s say an iPad) painfully coming to terms with being given self-awareness, on reflection turns out to have been slowly weaving itself into something insistent and familiar. Soon you’ll become aware of a tickling sensation at the back of your throat, warning you the apparent listlessness is all misdirection. But by then it’s too late. Each song has laid an invisible gossamer-thin web all around your brain. Try to move away and find you’re snared. Or you’ll induce a massive cerebral haemorrhage, which admittedly is something you don’t run the risk of with ‘The Look’.
Grimes – Oblivion
Grimes – Weregild
P.S. Full disclosure, anyone whose Wikipedia biography is comprised chiefly of a non-sequitur which culminates with the impounding of some chickens by the Minnesota police has already all but secured a positive write-up as far as I’m concerned.
The Men – Turn It Around
Why give this song the time of day? It struts about, waggling the riff from Stiff Little Finger’s ‘Suspect Device’ under your nose like it just don’t care. With strident, purposeful abandon, it hefts sonic bulk into your arms until the weight shifts and you tumble to the dust, bloody-nosed and bowlegged. Gain enough purchase to remain until the viscous, Melvins-esque drum breakdown near the end, however, and you’ll come out the other side having shed the accumulated silt of the week. It’s like rolling a mighty bread dough over your preoccupations and watching them be plucked up one by one, leaving you powdery but calm.
The boss is cross. And it’s a beautiful thing.
As we age, it’s customary that we become more accepting of, and in turn perpetuate, the many injustices that litter our world. In fact, over our lives we’re supposed to run the full gauntlet of ineffectuality: to progress from petulant, unfocused youths to preoccupied adults to wistful but detached oldtimers.
But it’s undeniable that ‘maturity’ is especially identified with restraint. As Churchill slurred out in one of his oft-quoted champion bits of self-justification, ‘If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain’, in the process spearing one of many depressing features of his realpolitik and equivocating it away with a glib piece of rhetoric.
When the wrinkled do get worked up, then, it’s all the more striking. Alongside their being a demographic that actually votes – which immediately marks them out from the feckless youth as actually worth listening to – that’s why even sworn enemies like slightly left-wing people and the media will collude for a money shot of a pensioner confronting a minster, as demonstrated when June Hautot cornered Andrew Lansley the other week to the delight of spectacle hungry 24-hour news channels everywhere.
Bruce Springsteen is the latest supposedly stately elder to impolitely jump the tracks. And it’s bracing. When I get angry, the result is much flapping about and inarticulate, spittle-flecked recriminations. When Bruce does, it’s a vital call to arms. His new album, ‘Wrecking Ball’, sees him wishing not only a hard rain down on Wall Street, but also some heavy duty demolition equipment, which I dare say may be slightly more effective. And by angry, I don’t mean in a ‘measured’, ‘dignified’ or ‘gracious’ way, but rather ‘almightily pissed off’. Fuming. Choleric. The boss is cross. No more than on ‘Shackled and Drawn’ where he thunders against the fat cats on ‘Bankers Hill’ over what can only be described as the world’s most irate Riverdance.
Springsteen has always been able to breeze over political divides where others, such as Neil Young with his 2006 ‘Living With War’ album, preach to the converted while getting booed of stage by everyone else. You may say that’s just because no one actually knows what he’s banging on about, as shown by ‘Born in the USA’’s misappropriation by Regan’s Republicans as the soundtrack of choice for patriotic stupefaction on its initial release. Or perhaps it’s just that Springsteen’s better able to project himself as on the side of the little guy. If that’s true, then he’s stealing a march on most modern liberals, who somehow have achieved the impressive task of making themselves appear more elitist than parties run out of the PR departments of big business. So, while it may be selfish of me to say, long may the high-blood pressure continue, Bruce.
Grim, depressing and tragic…So why is Born to Die shot like a Levi’s advert?
It may have passed you by, but this week saw the release of the first ‘event’ album of 2012. Following the slow-burn success of her debut single, the YouTube phenomenon ‘Video Games’, Lana Del Rey on Monday presented ‘Born to Die’ to an audience in a state of keen agitation. With it, the much trumpeted/ cattily derided singer – delete as appropriate depending on how much time you spend on the internet – presumably hopes to bring attention back to her music, after recent debate has focused more on the authenticity of her background (turns out she doesn’t actually spend that much time playing Call of Duty 4) or the outré, experimental nature of her live vocals (see her appearance on Saturday Night Live).
There’s been so much for people to alternatingly get prissily indignant about/virtuously rise above, in fact, that something that actually merits at the least our collective scrutiny has slipped under the radar. And unfortunately for Ms Del Rey it’s not her album (which, unremarkably, is being treasured and trashed by exactly the people you would expect). Rather, it’s her latest video, which sees the self-styled ‘Gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ playing one half of an abusive relationship. It depicts a building crescendo of domestic violence, threatened and actual. There’s just one odd thing. Why’s it all so picturesque?
If you haven’t seen it, a quick recap. As ‘Born to Die’ opens, we quickly determine the protagonists aren’t the kind of couple who spend their Friday nights watching New Girl together in their pyjamas. They stand together naked in front of a billowing American flag, he with his tattooed arms around her, she staring Bambi-eyes poignantly into the camera, their love clearly a flame which burns too brightly to countenance wearing t-shirts.
The narrative drive and tension of the rest of the video comes from the fact that we’re invited to imagine the intense stares and mimed violence – ooh look, he’s pretending to shoot her! Now he’s hiding in the shadows making a throat slitting gesture, the cad! – could boil over into something a bit more substantial at any minute. Or more accurately, given the title, wait eagerly until it does.
That it’s hardly going for gritty kitchen-sink realism in the manner of Tyrannosaur is apparent, given an early scene sees Ms Del-Rey sitting on a throne in a fantastical Versailles-like palace between two tigers (she’s a slinky yet unpredictable feline, geddit). But a whimsical context does not a licence to do anything make. If silliness were an excuse in itself, the west would still mainly know Muammar Gadaffi as a man with an army of virgin bodyguards and a slightly eccentric fashion sense.
In walking such dubious ground, Del Rey is of course only following in the footsteps of Rihanna, who kick-started the current trend for what I will indulgently term ‘bad boy plus’ in the video for the Eminem collaboration ‘Love the Way you Lie’ and, in sharp departure from the artistic restlessness which drives her musical endeavours, stooped to repeating the trick for ‘We Found Love’.
But perhaps such swift judgment is unfair. Music videos are tasked with conjuring up complex characters and relationships using only 3-4 minutes of glossy visuals, and maybe a shot of a droopy lipped waif with his hand on the protagonist’s throat as she sleeps is just an admirable time-saving efficiency, rather than the nasty attempt to elicit titillation from a unbearably grim scenario that I’d naively identified on first viewing.
And of course, introducing the vague possibility of death into a romantic fantasy is almost as conventional as the hoary old adage about danger and excitement of which it’s the natural conclusion. A kind of ultimate stakes-raising gambit, it has long provided the insta-epic to star-crossed lovers from Romeo and Juliet to Bella and Edward.
But the way it’s deployed here is especially disingenuous in the way it focuses on the result – the striking image of a prone, semi-clad Del Rey being cradled by her bare-chested boyfriend – and skips over the fact that we can only assume that it was he who put her in that state, a visual passive voice which almost suggests she’s simply expired from the sheer intensity of their relationship. What you’re left with is the unmistakable feeling that, rather than simply being badly misjudged, the violence was seen as just another stylish prop to sprinkle amidst the vintage muscle cars and flatteringly lit pouting (by both parties).
And as you give, Lana, so shall they receive: in an article typical of media reaction in general, the Metro ran its write-up under a headline about the rising star’s ‘sexy’ new video, the by-line breathlessly referring to Del Ray ‘smooching passionately with her on-screen lover before he carries her blood-covered corpse away’. The deafening lack of questioning voices shows that we’ve become so used to seeing such images that they don’t seem blaringly out of place in what is essentially the lightest of entertainment products. A murdered woman is now just so much provocative window-dressing.
Mass carping is never a particularly edifying prospect, especially when it’s directed at someone who, judging by her performance in this video and on the aforementioned episode of Saturday Night Live, gives the impression of being genuinely blinkered by the situations she now finds herself in. But Ms Del Rey is only going to be in more of them, and while how rich her father is or how long she’s had her lips patently doesn’t matter, some things are less easy to let pass by. The rehabilitation of what should be a deadening reminder of human beings’ endless ability to be crap as a fatuous shorthand for hot-blooded romance is one such, shall we say, ‘snafu’. It may not have started with her, but equally it would be appreciated if future appearances didn’t perpetuate it for the sake of some trailer-trash chic shtick. Perhaps next time, say it with a card.
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