I more or less stopped listening to music by new artists in around 2010, resigning myself thereafter to releases by bands already familiar to me from previous decades. Everything contemporary is for the kids, and most of it doesn’t sound very compelling to me anyway. Lana Del Rey, however, is one of the very few post-2010 artists to have made an impression on my jaded middle-aged ear. I remember, back in 2012, being struck by the quality of her breakthrough record Born to Die, how perfectly put together it seemed as an artistic package, how cuttingly authentic the lyrics were, how downright miserable it sounded. More impressive still was her willingness to take risks, to depart entirely from the hugely successful sound perfected on Born to Die by doing something completely different on its follow-up, 2014’s Ultraviolence. This seemed refreshingly different from her contemporaries, like Adele or Taylor Swift, who, from what I could gather, simply released an approximation of the same record every two years. Also in stark contrast to these acutely clean and stage-managed mannequins, Lana Del Rey appeared as a dark, Dionysian figure with a genuinely torrid personal life. Alone among her peers, I could readily have imagined her joining the 27 Club. Thankfully, she didn’t; in fact, she has continued to churn out albums, almost at the rate of one a year for the last decade. But did her drive to write “the next great American record” bear fruit?
Lana Del Rey (2010)
Lana Del Rey’s debut album has a mysterious history. It was released through a small record company which proved unable to adequately fund its promotion, so she bought back the rights to it. It was never re-released, and now leads a shadowy existence online, on little known YouTube videos and Soundcloud accounts. Sure enough, the album is rough around the edges, a million miles away from the polished pop sheen of its gazillion-selling successor. And yet, Lana Del Rey is an intriguing record. If anything, the sound is more experimental and varied than the homogenous pop pulse or guitar / piano-based blues of later albums. It veers from the borderline bubble-gum pop of “Smarty” and “Gramma” to the frantic redneck rock of “Queen of the Gas Station” and “Raise Me Up”, from the acoustic melancholy of “Oh Say Can You See” and “Pawn Shop Blues” to the disco throb of “Brite Lights”. Musically, then, it’s a bit of a glorious mess. Lyrically, though, it invokes an unsettlingly sleazy Americana; our promiscuous, somewhat unhinged narrator patrols dive bars, nightclubs, casinos, and gas stations, offering herself to a variety of unsavoury men, invoking a dark, faded, stateside imaginarium of Cadillacs, shotguns, cocaine and trailer parks. A compelling debut, and not just because of the mystique around its (non)release.
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Standout track: “Queen of the Gas Station”
Born to Die (2012)
Born to Die, the fastest selling album of 2012, catapulted Lana Del Rey into the mainstream. In contrast to her scattered debut, the sound is cohesive; a baroque pop record of icy electronic beats and cinematic strings – basically, a collection of Bond themes with triphop scaffolding. In 2012, this was a pioneering style, and its influence on the following ten years of pop was to prove inestimable. Thematically, Born to Die also evinced a considerable shift away from its predecessor. Sinister Americana remains the order of the day, but rather than the Cajun chaos of Lana Del Rey, here the spotlight shines on the decadent old money of the chilly East Coast, a milieu most notably brought to life on “National Anthem” and “Million Dollar Man”. This conspicuous (though tongue in cheek) fascination with the largesse of the Atlantic Seaboard is complemented by some worrying indications of Lana’s deteriorating mental state – the messed-up drunkard of “Carmen”, the car crash girlfriend of “Off to the Races”, the melodramatic and fatalistic title track, and perhaps most memorably, the grief-stricken megahit “Summertime Sadness”. This concerning picture of burgeoning psychological turmoil is completed by the striking co-dependency of Born to Die’s love songs, chief among them the funereal “Video Games”, which arguably launched Lana’s career. Overall, this is one of the decade’s classic pop albums – but it makes for a most unsettling listen.
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Standout track: “Born to Die”
Ultraviolence (2014)
After the fiery, Dionysian Deep South, and the icy, neurotic, affluent East Coast, it seems only logical that Lana’s third album, Ultraviolence, should invoke the drug-addled new age hangover of 21st century California. Indeed, that’s precisely where she moved to shortly before this album was made, and its influence is immediately discernible on the opening track, the languid, glassy eyed “Cruel World”. Gone are the cold-blooded pop beats and theatrical strings of Born to Die, here replaced by shattered, psychedelic guitars and gloomy, bluesy rock. Lyrically, the album’s first half revisits the morbid addiction to emotionally unavailable scoundrels which was the hallmark of its predecessor, most disturbingly on the macabre title track, with its toxic tale of domestic abuse. Certainly, later songs like “Money Power Glory” and “Fucked My Way Up to the Top” point to a slyly, but nonetheless aggressively feminist impulse behind the tragic beaten wife persona. Overall, however, Ultraviolence is startlingly downcast, perhaps the most deeply disturbed of all Lana’s records (with the possible exception of the next one). Its finest moment is the menacing and desolate “West Coast”, in which romantic and chemical addictions congeal into a sinister account of psychological discombobulation under the searing Californian sun.
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Standout track: “West Coast”
Honeymoon (2015)
For my money, Honeymoon represents the nadir of the depressive downward spiral that structured the first phase of Lana Del Rey’s career. It’s the sound of Born to Die’s suicidal East Coast trophy bride on a sun-drenched Californian holiday; basically, Madmen’s Betty Draper if she could write a killer pop song. In terms of its sound, Honeymoon represents a retreat from the grungy, psychedelic rock of Ultraviolence, and a step back in the direction of the baroque pop of Born to Die. This time around, however, the sound is more fragile, less urban, the frosty trip hop beats replaced by hazy synths and delicate string arrangements. Lana herself sounds strangely removed – surely a sign of Prozac-induced resignation rather than Buddhistic detachment. The album opens with its chilling, cinematic title track, which revisits Lana’s addiction to ladykilling ne’er-do-wells, a familiar theme further elaborated in eerie, glossy pop songs like “High by the Beach”, “Music to Watch Boys To”, and “Religion”. But the dark heart of Honeymoon lies in the glumly defeated “Terrence Loves You”, in the desperate wailing of “God Knows I Tried”, and in the Major Depressive Episode of “The Blackest Day”. There’s still time for a bit of humour on “Salvatore”, which describes Lana’s playful tryst with an Italian Stallion, but overall, Honeymoon is perhaps her most quietly distressed album.
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Standout track: “Honeymoon”
Lust for Life (2017)
Lust For Life represents a recognisable break in Lana Del Rey’s discography. Up until now, depression, addiction, and self-destruction have accompanied her music like increasingly insatiable furies, with the fiery furnace of Ultraviolence and the brittle, despairing Honeymoon serving as the twin rock bottoms of a seemingly inexorable downward trajectory. But 2017’s Lust for Life, as the name suggests, is where the Boethian Wheel begins to turn slowly upwards, and everything released since this record has been unmistakeably more life affirming than what preceded it. Musically, however, Lust for Life is rooted in the first phase of Lana’s career; it’s a pop record, which reintegrates some of the fat beats of Born to Die, and features collaborations with several hip-hop artists. There’s no suggestion that Lana has suddenly morphed into a Christian rock artist; her music remains bluesy and tormented, and even here, there are plenty of darker moments; the plaintive “White Mustang”, the familiar pining of “13 Beaches”, the spooky “Heroin”. And yet, for the first time, moments of joy and humour predominate; the blissful radio hit “Love”, the celebratory title track, and some amusingly meta collaborations with celestial classic rock spirit guides like Sean Lennon and Stevie Nicks. Album closers “Change” and “Get Free” explicitly, if uncertainly, thematise Lana’s reinvigorated, post-Saturn Return rebirth. It’s just a shame that there’s so much filler.
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Standout track: “Get Free”
Continued in part II.