Review
Since posting a home-made music video for the outstanding ‘Video Games’ last summer, Lana Del Rey (née Lizzy Grant) has been exalted and derided in equal measure. The Guardian rewarded her with ‘Song of the Year’, Hipster Runoff gleefully exposed her as a ‘failed mainstream artist’ (though her first album of recorded material is far more obtuse than Born to Die), while Popjustice interjected, clutching her to the bosom of the pop charts. At the centre of it all is a reluctant Del Rey. She’s shy in interviews, thoroughly uncomfortable on television and ill-at-ease about the hype that her songs, and PR team, have created.
In her lyrics Lana Del Rey admits that she’s ‘blurring the lines between real and the fake’ and she does so brilliantly. From the cinematic opening strings of the title track, Born To Die plays like the soundtrack to a noir film of the life of Del Rey. The opening track sets the album up well with its lush strings, big-beats, and eerie preternatural yelps. What follows is an almost overwhelming succession of top-notch tracks. The bouncy ‘Off to the Races’ lifts the opening line of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and sees Del Rey half rapping about a ride-or-die spree with her bad boy beau; ‘Glass room, perfume, cognac, lilac, fumes / Says it feels like heaven to him’.
On ‘Blue Jeans’ she coos, ‘I grew up on hip-hop’ over a minimalist beat and it shows. She purrs lines that could have been lifted straight out of an old-skool rap hit; ‘Love you more than those bitches before’. Church bells signal the beginning of last year’s most arresting single ‘Video Games’, it’s unreadable delivery still as captivating as it was on first listen. These four tracks alone justify Born To Die’s heavy hype and, though the rest of the tracks can’t quite compare to the opening quartet, there’s still plenty more on offer here.
To contrast the gloominess of ‘Video Games’, there’s the up-tempo hip-hop drumloop of ‘Diet Mountain Dew’ and the dreamy sweetness of ‘Radio’. ‘National Anthem’ (though subdued from its demo form) builds to an undeniably joyful 4th of July-style chant: ‘Red, white, blues in the sky / Summer’s in the air and baby heaven’s in your eyes’. Del Rey celebrates love, fame and money all in the same breathy coo, proudly declaring that this is ‘a love story for the sixth page’ with ‘wining and dining, excessive buying, overdose and dying’.
Born To Die is all exquisitely produced, almost to its own detriment. Similarly to Florence + the Machines’s Ceremonials, the epic lushness of the production begins to nullify the album’s later songs. On ‘Summertime Sadness’, the big beats and string section formula drowns out brilliant lines about how ‘the telephone wires above are sizzling like a snare’.
‘That’s where the beginning of the end begun’, she purrs on the album closer, ‘This Is What Makes Us Girls’. Though easily the most autobiographical track on offer, ‘Girls’ only adds to Del Rey’s mystique, telling the story of a group of rich girls who feel the need to rebel. Though the rest of Born To Die deals with her infatuation with bad boys, the most significant heartbreak was being taken away from her high school girlfriends: ‘They were the only friends I ever had / Waving on the train platform / Crying cos I know I’m never coming back’.
Cohesive, absorbing and well-written, Born To Die takes the listener on Lana Del Rey’s quasi-biographical journey. Whereas Adele took the rawness of a post-break-up night of self-pity watching Bridget Jones on DVD, Del Rey creates a semi-fictitious novella from her relationship breakdown. Lizzy Grant is very much at the heart of Born To Die and by sprinkling her songs with references to Lolita, Rikers Island and Chateau Marmont she immerses the listener in the life of Lana Del Rey. It’s a fallacy to claim that Del Rey is inauthentic simply because she offers up stories rather than memoirs (after all, Bowie wasn’t ever involved in the space program). Detractors should feel foolish, Born To Die is an undeniably solid record and Lana Del Rey is, as it turns out, the real deal.
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