Born To Die

The internet’s told you about “Lana Del Rey”. Let’s not get into that right now. The Lana Del Rey that counts has her name adorning Born To Die, an album madly, deeply in love with it’s own assumed
sumptuous glamour. It’s an intensely cinematic world: the grand, nouveau riche aesthetic it strives
towards peaking early on with ‘Video Games’ and ‘Born to Die’ before being emulated continuously
elsewhere. Each one of these woozy, soporific songs about red dresses falling off in slow motion;
Hollywood glitz; lovers who drive off in the middle of the night and the smudged mascara eyes they leave behind; pile up on top of each with each orchestral flourish and melodramatic melody until it’s frankly wearying, an iteration of the Ludovico Technique consisting entirely of James Bond opening titles.

The album is actually at its best when it tries something different. She and her producers have a knack for captivating bridges, and the track which represents a real, fundamental break from the file under Del Rey mold is penultimate track ‘Summertime Sadness’. Here the beats and allusions to hip-hop sampling that briefly surface elsewhere are actually seized upon and toyed around with, and the result is a real, meaty chunk of brilliant pop music whose playfulness signifies what so much of the rest of the record is missing.

I have no problem with the persona, or the concept. I’ve tried to steer away from that discussion in this review because it’s quite simply null in the first place – pop music is indeed at its very best when it’s populated by big characters making bold and vibrant music. The problem with Del Rey’s dark-hearted Hollywood damsel in distress, lies in it being shoved down our throats so readily that it’s starved of air and killed off. The persona isn’t developed – there’s only so much semi-ironic self-loathing one can take, and it quite simply just leaves you feeling dull by the end of it all. Drawing from her twin influences of doomed epic romances (the self described “Hollywood Sadcore”) and her rich white girl interpretation of hip-hop culture (again self-described “Gangster Nancy Sinatra”), the result is frequently these incredibly heavy-handed, clichéd lyrics that emote plenty but come to signify nothing: “Money is the reason we all exist/ everybody knows it/ kiss kiss”. Great. Thanks Lana. (Also just a general complaint – taking someone’s body downtown means pretty much nothing. It’s just a faux-hip-hop filler phrase for the masses.)

But as an artist constructed all the way up to the lips, there’s still room for what’s left at the top to shine through, and it’s that portion which connects best on this album, the shared instinctual response to the truth beneath some of these songs. Alongside the lyrics, the vocals can be off-puttingly affected at points with their taunting hiccups and plummy lows, and consequently it is in the very quietest, most honest moments where the steamroller of emotion has just reached the peak of its momentum that Del Rey comes across best. In that instant lines like “I don’t want to wake up from this tonight” and “I will love you til’ the end of time” are delivered with Lana’s vocals at their best and most heartrending. Perhaps, it is unsurprising then that ‘Video Games’ remains the track closest to being completely faultless. For nearly five glorious minutes, the aforementioned moment is extended perfectly, and it still hits me in the heart in a way that no Adele song ever has. It’s the musical and emotional core of the entire record. It’s the eyes beneath the eye shadow.

Authenticity doesn’t come into it. It’s musical achievement. And as a holistic statement, Born to Die is let down by an over-adherence to a single design, the effect of which is that the impact of Del Rey’s best songs (‘Video Games’, ‘Summer Sadness’ &c.) is spread to the extent of being translucent over 50 minutes. Her aspirations towards the epic love and loss of the Queen of Carthage, actually just leave her as a ballsier, angsty Dido whose whiskey tastes stale, rather than her tea’s gone cold, and whilst there’s an immense amount of promise here, the overriding sensation here is one of disappointment, akin to biting into something still wrapped in a layer of plastic film.

**Download:** ‘Summertime Sadness’, ‘Video Games’