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Oct 8, 2021I Want The Door To Open stands in stark contrast to The Lamb, setting opposing goals and aiming for a different audience, but both remain uncompromising visions of West, a songwriter whose proven on top of everything else, her inventiveness.
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Oct 8, 2021West has said she intended the album to resemble a “poem or a puzzle box,” and often, the obfuscation is part of the charm. Occasionally, though, there are too many barriers between West and what she wants to say.
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Oct 14, 2021Her musician friends help bring the songs to life, and the best guests are the singers that emphasize the emotion in West’s performance like actors sharing a scene.
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Oct 8, 2021While I Want the Door to Open is likely to both alienate some fans of Lala Lala's rawer early material and capture the attention of new ones, taken on its own, it feels like a deliberately unsettled middle ground.
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Oct 8, 2021Cameos from the poet Kara Jackson (“Straight & Narrow”) and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard (“Plates”) help round out an album that, on the surface, is a pleasant and hypnotic indie pop collection—but examined just a little bit more deeply is a concerted effort by a talented and thoughtful artist who is trying to find the deeper meaning to what their art (and life) is all about.
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Oct 11, 2021It’s an impressive display of ambition and reinvention, all the more dramatic because singer-songwriters in Lala Lala’s previous, Liz Phair-ish incarnation are 10-a-penny.