Lemonade Review

The first half is anger and the second half is repair, and the arc from suspicion through rage to forgiveness is laid out so plainly that the album works as narrative before it works as songs. The range is the point. Country on one track, Louisiana swamp rock on the next, reggae inflected pop, an arena rock guitar solo, a New Orleans brass finale, and none of it reads as tourism because the writing underneath stays fixed on one marriage.

Critics who had spent a decade calling her a technician had to stop, because she is specific here in a way she never had been, and the specificity is what makes the appearances by Jack White, James Blake and Kendrick Lamar land as choices rather than features. Warsan Shire's poetry stitches the film and the audio together and gives the whole project its spine.

The reservations are small and mostly about the seams, since a record that changes idiom every four minutes cannot help sounding assembled in places, and the middle stretch leans harder on mood than on melody. Nobody serious disputes what it is. Formation closes it by turning a private reckoning into a public one, and the consensus has not moved since the week it appeared.