Jessie Ware returned with soulful "Tough Love"

British techno-chanteuse Jessie Ware caught our attention two years ago as one of the freshest voices in alternative R&B with her elegant vocals and understated sound highlighted on her acclaimed debut album "Devotion." Since then, Ware hasn't done much on the music front, but now she is set to return with her as-yet-untitled sophomore album later this year and has shared the video for the new album's elegantly devastating first single, "Tough Love."
On Ware's earlier songs, she demonstrated a soulful style of downtempo pop. With "Tough Love," produced by BenZel, she experiments with even softer atmospheric textures and plays with the tonality in her voice. It's a warm new-age power ballad, one that's slow to build, but once it does around the three-minute mark, the song explodes into a gorgeous crescendo of buzzing synths against Ware's alluring vocals. "Tough Love" has ethereal, Kate-Bush-esque vocals, a crisp, Prince-ly beat, and enough thick, delicious bass to satisfy the fans who came to her via electronic artists like SBTRKT and Joker.
"Tough Love" is a convincing sign that Ware may actually outdo her first album with her next. Speaking about the track previously, Ware commented: "I had just finished a run of shows in the States and went to NY to work with BenZel for a couple weeks, mainly as a different focus to touring. I didn't have any expectations or pressures with what would come out of those two weeks, and think 'Tough Love' sums this up. It was me experimenting with my voice and having fun with it. It just felt right and kind of dictated the route of the next album, much like 'Devotion' did on my first album." Ware's lyrics were inspired by the trails of maintaining a long-term relationship with her fiancée while touring round the world. "It's not always easy being away from the person that I love so much, but I'm also doing something that I really, really love," she explained. "It's realistic that it's not always real easy."
Directed by BRTHR, the clip plays like a European experimental film from the early '70s. It matches that song's slow-burning aesthetic and seamlessly translates the song's gossamer vibes into visual form, which mainly means lots of shots of roses, lights and sees the London soul singer running through a sunny field and lying among purple flowers. The clip is full of ravishing golden-hour images of the back of Ware's head, film that changes from color to black-and-white, and close-up images of plant life and underwater faces. It's not an attention-grabbing video, or even a particularly notable one, but it's all arranged around the song, which still kills.

Jessie Ware loosen bun with "Imagine It Was Us"

After watching the great British soul-soul singer Jessie Ware's ultra-serene vibe in her "Devotion," "Sweet Talk," and "If You're Never Going To Move" videos, it's a real treat to see the 28-year-old songstress' loosen the bun and let her hair down literally and figuratively in the early '90s-tinged new clip for "Imagine It Was Us," one of two bonus songs from the just-released American edition "Gold Edition" of Ware's Mercury Prize–nominated debut album, "Devotion," eight months after the release of her debut LP in her native UK.
Ware's backstory is not particularly dramatic, but there is an aspect to it that speaks to the masses, primarily in her maintained attitude that she is quite ordinary. Ware was not someone looking for pop stardom her whole life, but, rather, took at stab at being a soccer reporter before taking jobs as a backup singer at the encouragement of her mother. Now, Ware is already a big star in her native UK, but she's still trying to crack into the charts stateside. "It's either going to work or it's not. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy playing for people willing to vogue to my music," she said. "American audiences have been so fabulous and fun, the majority of them gay—men in front beating the rails, screaming, 'Guuuurl! Lawd have mercy!'"
"Imagine It Was Us," is an evocative, clubby jam. and it channels Michael Jackson in the most danceable track under her own name that she has released yet. The track definitely upholds the standard of quality Ware established with "Devotion," but it does differentiate itself from the prince-esque energy that made that album so great. The track pulses with a familiar and current pining for the dance floor in a manner she largely avoided on "Devotion" last year.
Ware gets to play disco queen in an '80s-style vogue club in Kate Moross-directed clip, which features a possible Madonna homage, and takes Ware out of the "If You're Never Going To Move" garden and into a darkened, sexy, disco ball-topped club where the costumes range from baroque to barely-there, and also probably the same club Madonna visited in "Deeper and Deeper." Dancing to a synth-lined, thumping track, Ware shakes her groove thing in a crop top and a long, lamorous ball gown as a hoard of scantily clad club revelers undulate next to her. Ware's not quite the diva Madonna is, but she does a beyond-satisfying job of transporting us back to the "Voguing" era. It's maybe the most visually slick thing we've yet seen from Ware, and she looks like she's having fun.

Lana Del Rey Strikes A Pose In "Carmen"

Lana Del Rey is back with another visually arresting music video for her new single "Carmen," is taken from Del Rey's first major-label album "Born to Die," which debuted at No.2 on Billboard Hot 200. "The album is a tribute to living life on the wild side. I'm sort of kidding because I'm not that wild any more... I used to drink a lot. Too much," she once said. "I haven't had a drink for seven years now," the 25-year-old singer said.
"Carmen" is a dark tale of pretty-girl psychosis and it narrates the lifestyle of a 17-year-old Hollywood party girls like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, and the 'Blue Jeans' singer tries to give hints at how she grew up in the Big Apple and returns to the found-footage motif with a mix of strippers, instructional drug videos and digitally aged clips with vintage, early-1960s appeal that "explains everything" in the newly-released clip. Among the images in the video are blooming roses, athletically gifted pole dancers, as well as clips from a scientific video that explores the chemical effects of crystal methamphetamine.
This cautionary tale of a doomed woman who sells her body on the streets is littered with Coney Island references. Del Rey told The Sun: "Carmen is a song I can't say too much about because it's so close to my heart. It's the song on the record I relate to most closely. It's set partly in Coney Island, a place that's been important to me throughout my New York City career." Coney Island is a peninsula in southernmost Brooklyn, and was America's original Sin City, decades before Las Vegas, and was rife with prostitution.
Spliced into the footage of the video are schematics of methamphetamine and audio blurbs that ask how meth can change your brain. With a siren-like voice, Del Rey is no stranger to the mash-up video style herself and she continues in this vein for "Carmen," and she designates the video as a "BIO PIC" in the video's YouTube description, but it's up to the viewer to decide how much or how little is an authentic glimpse into the life of the singer, who has been widely criticized for relying too heavily on artifice.