• Feb

  3

  Review: Lana Del Rey, Born to Die

  Filed under: album review, Listening to ..., Music, Reviews; Tagged as: album review, Lana Del Rey, Lana Del Rey Born to Die review
  

  It is fashionable to pick on Lana Del Rey. I am not a very fashionable guy.

  When I downloaded her new album, Born to Die, I knew a bit about her background and of course had caught her now infamous Saturday Night Live appearance – the one NBC News anchor and music blogger Brian Williams called, “one of the worst outings in SNL history.” Kanye West and Ashlee Simpson set a pretty high hurdle for that accusation, but her performance didn’t hold my attention that night. Maybe it was the bourbon.

  But the other day, when I hit play on that download in my car, I was transfixed.

  It seems appropriate that Del Rey sits next to Lady Gaga on my player’s artist list, because while she doesn’t sound anything like LaGaga, she is trying to create a mood, a persona. It’s a contrast between big, dramatic classic sounds and lyrics that are very 21st Century, sometimes teenage. It’s like she’s trying to have mid-century Hollywood glamour in the context of 2012.

  Occasionally she pushes the mood a bit too hard, like on Summertime Sadness. But when it works, it is a rapturous sonic escape like Video Game in which Del Ray sings about an old school-style romance but the keeps dropping in a somewhat jarring line about the guy wanting to play a video game. She peppers other dichotomies like that through the album, but never breaks the lush production and never, unlike that SNL turn, loses our interest.

  The lingering question after a few listens to Born to Die is where will Lana Del Rey take her music from here? And when you release your first major label album, that’s a good thing to have people wondering.

  Frankly, I have no idea what people are complaining about. Maybe Del Rey is better if you don’t Google her before you listen to the album.

  
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