Lana Del Rey gets icy in Born to Die

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Unwrinkled cocktail visitor

Lana Del Rey

has a lot in common with decrepit

Newt Gingrich

this week. They're a names on everyone's lips; we're all gratified to have them around, out of appreciation or perfect blood sport; and there's a ubiquitous expectancy that conjunction will be many some-more than a footnote in their particular races a month from now.

The atmosphere is still thick with post-"Saturday Night Live" schadenfreude as "Born to Die,"

Del Rey

's initial manuscript underneath her stream nom de plume, arrives in stores. She's already been a Meme of a Millennium, yet artist of a week competence be a worse highway for her. Six months' value of pre-release expectation and madness positively make it harder for critics to consider a manuscript on a possess terms. as against to reviewing a recoil to a recoil to a backlash.

With a hype and sturm und drang momentarily set aside (as if that's possible!), "Born to Die" turns out not to be a DOA disturbance some likely after her catastrophic "SNL" stint. But conjunction is it a live-wire delight we competence have hoped for after final year's "Video Games" singular seemed to outrider a uninformed new voice. Like a lot of nascent efforts, it's promising, frustrating, infrequently overachieving, infrequently overreaching and a arrange of thing that would have we presaging good things for her in 5 years -- if her success weren't being presented as a do-or-die proposition.

The problem isn't all to do with a hoopla. Del Rey creates it tough for anyone to write off her weaker moments as unawareness when she presents as a unequivocally essence of seen-it-all jadedness. If she's already 25 going on 55, what's she ostensible to grow adult into?

Sometimes Del Rey seems frank in her languid, lovelorn romanticism, and infrequently she's outrightly personification a bullion digger. The many provocative instance of her Material Girl guise is "Off to a Races," in that she adopts a baby-doll voice to sing about being a bikini-clad eye candy in a swimming pool dignified by a sugarine daddy - as if Steely Dan's asocial "Babylon Sisters" were being retold from a indicate of perspective of a immature girlfriend. "Bright blue ripples, we sittin', sippin' on your black Cristal, yeah," she sings, in tones that will come off as mocking to everybody solely maybe hip-hop die-hards. "He doesn't mind we have an L.A. pretentious approach about me/He loves me with each kick of his heroin heart."

This is not an manuscript that goes improved with coke, though. If there's any '70s drug of choice you'd associate with a album, it'd have to be Quaaludes, given a semi-glacial gait during that all 15 songs move. The strings, a idle trip-hop beats, and Del Rey's deliberately beyond-languid smoothness all collaborate toward heavy-liddedness.

Figuring when Del Rey is being frank and when she's being satirical isn't always an easy task, given she sings roughly all with a same miss of impact (and, some would say, miss of effect). When a lyrics are "God, you're so handsome/Take me to a Hamptons. Do we consider you'll buy me lots of diamonds?," it's easy to know where she's entrance from.

In removed doses, "Born to Die" can seem half-brilliant -- generally if that sip is "Video Games," that still binds up. The newness of pairing such an extraordinary pretension with such a beautifully unhappy tune hasn't ragged off, as inconsistent harps and bells conduct to make life a Nintendo-loving beloved sound roughly ethereal. When a strain came out final year, a song's juxtapositions seemed ironic. But after conference a high-end decline described in other songs, going to a drink bar with a unchanging man unequivocally does sound like salvation.

How many albums will Del Rey -- a anti-Adele -- ever get to rise a some-more unchanging persona, or during slightest navigate a improved trail between ardour and schtick? Hard to guess. But with all a beforehand posing here, a line Elvis Costello sang years ago in a strain called "All Grown Up" seems apropos: "You haven't warranted a fatigue that sounds so cloyed on your tongue."

(Editing by Chris Michaud)

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