Del Rey goes back to her well of swooning melodies, twanging guitars, Twin Peaks-ish Americana and cinematic ballads about women in love with ne’er-do-wells
We live in a world of terrifying flux and instability, where any consideration of what might happen next comes with a side order of blind terror. If you were looking to understand the appeal of Lana Del Rey, eight years and five albums since her commercial breakthrough, you might alight on the fact that she offers a certain respite from uncertainty. You put her albums on and know more or less exactly what will happen next. There will be ballads decorated with cinematic orchestration. Guitars will twang and electronics will waft and surge in a manner that evokes Angelo Badalementi’s soundtrack to Twin Peaks, and her voice will be swathed in reverb in a manner that evokes Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. The vocals will have a dead-eyed quality at odds with the yearning ache of the lyrics, in which girls will simper after brooding n’er-do-wells they invariably address as “baby”. A world will be conjured in which every woman is a weak, willing victim and every man an unmitigated tosser and dark intimations of sexual exploitation and violence will co-exist with a kind of 80s Athena poster version of dangerous masculinity: whatever the song, she will invariably sound like she’s singing to a monochrome Matt Dillon lookalike in a white vest, carrying a truck tyre against a desert backdrop, a cigarette dangling from his bruised lips.
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