Lemonade

Lemonade is Beyoncé’s finest hour.

Lemonade marks Beyoncé’s most accomplished work yet. It is the perfect combination of the sharp songwriting of 4 with the visual storytelling acumen of her self-titled record. Here, we see Beyoncé fully coming into her own: wise, accomplished, and in defense of herself.

This is her second visual album, and Lemonade is best served with the visuals, a semi-autobiographical film with deft dream-logic, a Purple Rain for the internet age. Its waves wash over the political-commercial-aesthetic limits of Beyonce, which at the time of its release felt a generic/political revelation, but now seems watered-down compared to the bittersweet specificity and holler of Lemonade.

Her boldest, most ambitious, best album to date.

Lemonade is fiery, insurgent, fiercely proud, sprawling and sharply focused in its dissatisfaction.

It’s a rare album that sounds this warm, this easy, this melodic, this fierce, this startling, this unforgettable.

Lemonade is her most emotionally extreme music, but also her most sonically adventurous.

Lemonade is by far Beyoncé’s strongest album.

It is both album and manifesto, and illustrates the true power of art. The power to conjure back from the dark the voice of people the world has chosen to ignore.

All over Lemonade, Beyoncé is describing her own personal reality, on her terms and informed by her worldview. That the album simultaneously pushes mainstream music into smarter, deeper places is simply a reminder of why she remains pop’s queen.

Never short on vocal confidence, here, she trades divadom for arresting, unconventional shapes. [Jul 2016, p.69]

With all matters of the heart explored in extremely intimate detail it sees Beyoncé back on top of the pop world ready to slay like only she can.

As a body of songs, Lemonade presents Bey at her most skilled and fully matriculated as a pop studio maven and conductor of the present’s preferred orchestral mode: creative file-sharing. ... Lemonade the album, however, is out to sonorously suck you into its gully gravitational orbit the old fashioned way, placing the burden of conjuration on its steamy witches’ brew of beats, melodies, and heavy-hearted-to-merry-pranksterish vocal seductions.

The result is an album in which millions will find their own struggles reflected back to them, as therapeutic as it is utterly dazzling. If you've ever been handed lemons, you need Lemonade.

Lemonade is Beyoncé at her most benevolent, and her most unadulterated. Treating her blackness not as an affliction but a celebratory beacon, Lemonade is a long overdue, cathartic retribution.

["Sorry,"] is a combative, unglossy track on an album full of them. ... As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.

On the fierce, vivid Lemonade, Beyoncé goes full shock and awe.

By effortlessly topping her own best work. Lemonade now sets a new standard for cross-genre collaboration.

It’ll take a while to absorb everything that Beyonce has poured into her sixth studio album--a dozen songs plus a 60-minute movie that is more than just a mere advertisement for the music, but an essential companion that provides context and deepens understanding. But it’s apparent already that Lemonade is the artist’s most accomplished and cohesive work yet.

Lemonade is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up.

Lemonade hits hard. Beyonce has chosen to portray herself like this, and those choices are bold, powerful and at times, properly shocking. [#361, p.110]

With its wealth of sonic adventure, its thoughtful merger of the personal and the political, and its four choice guest spots (Jack White; Kendrick Lamar; James Blake; Abel Makkonen Tesfaye AKA The Weeknd), Lemonade is a dazzling example of pooled talent coalescing around an iconic doyenne. There can be little doubt on whose head Prince’s crown should now sit.

Musically it’s the first half of the album that shows us a new side of Beyoncé, one that thrives in dark atmospheres and minimalism in a way her music never did before.

This is a record that is highly sonically ambitious, and even the moments that don’t quite come together are carried by Beyoncé’s vocal talents and sheer star power.

Lemonade isn’t an easy album, but it wasn’t meant to be. Lemonade is blessed with nuance and fueled by anger, awash in politics but still meant to be consumed as a pop product. It’s as danceable as it is dark, as incendiary as it is inspiring.

In a year when the world’s biggest artists have put their necks on the line--Rihanna’s leave-me-alone, independent streak of ‘Anti’, Kanye West’s scatterbrained ever-changing doodle ‘The Life of Pablo’--Beyoncé can count herself as a risk-taker breaking new ground, up there with the bravest.

What sets Lemonade apart are the ways it continually highlights the fine line between empathy and anger. It’s a line Beyoncé walks with supreme confidence.

Pop culture's reigning diva appeared in raw form--a vulnerable mess and unapologetically enraged as she thematically confronted her husband and father's alleged infidelity publicly, through visceral imagery and emotionally loaded sonic offerings.

Lemonade is strikingly varied. ... Where her huge team fails to innovate is on the album’s drab middle few cuts about acceptance and forgiveness--chief among them the horrible hoedown ‘Daddy Lessons’, which blends whooping with boring rhymes (“Daddy made me fight / It wasn't always right”). But the final four tracks see quality return, and penultimate track ‘All Night’, in particular, is one of Beyoncé’s most nuanced vocal performances to date.

The difference is that those albums [Anti and The Life Of Pablo] were at best a bold and intriguing mess: the sense that the artists behind them were having trouble marshalling their ideas was hard to escape. Lemonade, however, feels like a success, made by someone very much in control.

The cathartic and wounded moments here resonate in a manner matched by few, if any, of Beyoncé's contemporaries. She sometimes eclipses herself in terms of raw emotion, as on the throttling Jack White encounter "Don't Hurt Yourself." At the low-volume end, there's more power in the few seconds she chokes back tears while singing "Come back"--timed with the backing vocal in Isaac Hayes' version of "Walk on By"--than there is in most contemporary ballads.