Hollywood sadcore musician Lana Del Rey has already announced a follow-up album to 2017's Lust for Life. Having been announced as titled Norman Fucking Rockwell and set to be released in early 2019, Del Rey has already released two singles from the album - "Mariners Apartment Complex" and "Venice Bitch." "Mariners Apartment Complex" is a folksy piano and acoustic guitar ballad that sounds like it could belong on the latter half of Lust for Life. There is also an instrumental break near the end of the song that calls back to the surf rock and blues rock sounds prevalent on 2014's Ultraviolence (my favorite Lana Del Rey album so far). (I am reminded especially of the song "Flipside" which is found on the Target exclusive edition of Ultraviolence.) On "Mariners Apartment Complex," Del Rey sings in her signature breathy whisper, and she also showcases her vast range, hitting both a low and a high register. Del Rey has come forth about the song's meaning, saying that it's based on an actual experience in which a guy whom she was seeing told her that he felt that they were seeing each other because of how sad that they both were, and Lana was surprised by his comment because she didn't think of herself as sad: "You took my sadness out of context," she explains in the song's opening lyric. I like "Mariners Apartment Complex" for the most part, but the main problem that I have with it is that it, more than likely coincidentally, sounds strikingly similar to the 2007 song "Where I Stood" by Missy Higgins. Aspects of the instrumentals are nearly identical, and parts of the singers' melodies are also similar. I cannot listen to "Mariners Apartment Complex" without thinking about "Where I Stood," so it is difficult for me to wholly think of it as an original song.
"Mariners Apartment Complex" features the lyric, "...your Venice bitch, your die-hard, your weakness," and this is a nod to the the second single from Norman Fucking Rockwell titled "Venice Bitch." (Considering the fact that the cover art for "Mariners Apartment Complex" features Lana wearing a shirt that says Venice Bitch and the cover art for "Venice Bitch" features a building, I wish that the covers were switched, but I digress.) I prefer "Venice Bitch" to "Mariners Apartment Complex" because the melody is beautiful in a lulling way, and the song transports me to a dreamy and otherworldly place, especially because of its warbling electric guitar. Like much of Del Rey's work, the song calls back to 1970s folk rock and also, mainly because of the aforementioned electric guitar, sounds a bit psychedelic. Something that makes "Venice Bitch" truly special is that it runs at nearly ten minutes long, making it Lana's longest running song to date. Even so, however, I am easily lost in it, and the ten minutes do not feel like ten minutes. I do think that there will probably be a shorter edit released eventually, considering the fact that it is a single and no radio station is likely to play a song that long. (Del Rey's managers even advised against this song being released as a single, but the gall that it takes to release a single this long despite being warned not to is one of several reasons why I love Lana - she breaks rules.) I already feel fairly confident that "Venice Bitch" will be one of my favorite songs on Norman Fucking Rockwell, and I can even already say that it is one of my favorite songs from her catalogue thus far. It is simply brilliant, and I cannot wait for Norman Fucking Rockwell (even though I am not too thrilled with the title because the vulgarity seems unnecessarily tacky), which, as previously stated, is supposed to drop in early 2019.
Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation is set to follow up its 2014 album Hydra (and lead singer Sharon den Adel's 2018 solo project My Indigo) with Resist, set to be released on December 14, 2018. (The album cover, as can be seen below, is, without a doubt, one of the coolest album covers that I have ever seen, not just from Within Temptation but from any artist ever.) The album's first single "The Reckoning" is not only an epic song but also features an epic and cinematic music video featuring the band fighting off an alien invasion. This is a comeback about which I am very excited, and one reason for that could be that it has, as previously stated, been four years since the band last released an album, and "The Reckoning" offers a fresh energy that proves that the hiatus (caused in part by den Adel suffering from writer's block and from personal problems) was more than likely not only worth it but also needed, especially since I personally consider Hydra to be one of the band's weakest efforts to date, even though I do love songs like "Paradise (What About Us?)" (featuring the phenomenal Tarja, which was a dream collaboration for me), "And We Run" (a collaboration with rapper Xzibit that surprisingly worked exceedingly well), and "Whole World Is Watching" (featuring either Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum or Piotr Rogucki of Coma, depending on which edition of the album is being discussed). "The Reckoning" promises an album afire, however, and as soon as I saw the album title, I suspected that Resist would likely be about the world's currently toxic political climate, caused in large part by Donald Trump, president of the United States. Within Temptation is, after all, no stranger to discussing political issues such as war, as they have on tracks like "The Howling" and "Our Solemn Hour," and when I first saw Resist's tracklisting, I noted that the closing track on Resist is titled "Trophy Hunter," which I am thinking is probably in reference to Trump's endorsement of elephant trophy hunting (something that his sons even take part in themselves), so this promises to be a significant and culturally relevant album (as was 2007's The Heart of Everything which dropped in the heat of the Iraq War).
"The Reckoning" features guest vocals from Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix (who is unfortunately conspicuously absent from the music video), and I am very pleased with the collaboration because Shaddix really helps amplify the song, which is already very energetic as it is. The song is anthemic in nature, driven by what sounds like melodic horn and electronic, almost dubstep, vibes, giving the song more of a futuristic vibe than the band has ever presented before. (In fact, it seems to be the direct opposite of many of Within Temptation's older songs influenced by traditional sounds like Celtic music.) The melody of "The Reckoning" is catchy, rich, and powerful, and it manages to be both upbeat and dark, hopeful and also bleak. "We're all alone," Shaddix laments in the second verse, "walking in twilight; the night has been long, and so many have fallen. Feel no remorse; light will be breaking. Our freedom is worth it all." One can see from this verse alone how the song manages to deal with both darkness and light in its lyrics, as it points out problems but also offers solutions. The song is, similarly to aforementioned Within Temptation songs like "The Howling" and "Our Solemn Hour," likely addressing war, lamenting the unnecessary loss of life that runs rampant throughout the world. Unlike those songs, however, "The Reckoning" offers hope, reminding us that we have a voice and can rise up and resist the destruction, that we can choose to be better: "We'll rise against; we'll always hold the line of reckoning." My favorite part of the song is near the end of the song when the chorus is repeated in a quieter and calmer manner, which is then broken by an electronic explosion leading into the song returning to its heavy and more aggressive state. (This is also my favorite part of the music video, as the electronic outbreak happens at the exact moment that the band begins to take the alien spacecraft down.) "The Reckoning" is, without a doubt, one of my favorite Within Temptation songs to date, featuring a tone similar to that found on The Heart of Everything (despite some fans' claims that this is a totally new sound for them), only more electronic and more energetic, and I cannot wait for Resist to drop in December.
