Lana Del Rey - Born To Die
This thing frustrates me very much.
The Video Games / Blue Jeans single made a virtue of its brevity, a textbook summary of how to write a properly good, considered pop song. The album should have followed suit and confused everyone by being a concise collection of candidates for the chart; no filler, a Robyn EP rather than one of Girls Aloud or Sugababes’s surprisingly turgid full-lengths.
There are extended bits of wonder in this album. The first four songs, including both sides of Lana’s first single, are perfect pop music, combining her weary drone with simple, elegaic blocks of melody. Everything is the result of a studious, considered approach - nothing is challenging, nothing is complex - but then that’s the point. I don’t know who has written all of these pieces, but whoever is responsible has the inevitable touch of an absolute expert at how you get the general populace - the ones who don’t actually like music, just want something pleasant on in the car - interested, balancing limited counter-melodies as well as could be imagined. There’s no point scoffing and moaning - this is an art like any other, and well capable of either being done tragically, or being done consummately.
Unfortunately, and despite a reasonable dry groove, things flicker to Natasha Bedingfield territory with Diet Mountain Dew, and then reach a nadir with Dark Paradise, an apology for a song reminiscent of what the end product might be if one gave a toddler a crayon and asked it to draw their own representation of ‘grief’ on the wall. It’s at this point that it becomes impossible to ignore Lana’s wildly fluctuating lyrics. How can someone with the base ability to play simply and skilfully with the rhythms of her words (“Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don’t know why”) be content with churning out junk like “Pick me up and take me like a vitamin, cos my body’s sweet like sugar in the morning, yeah”?
Then there’s the length. The length. This thing is an hour. Strip out the filler and bring it down to 35 minutes and Lana would have a record to be wholly envious of, the kind that sensitive bearded Bon Iver fans would have had to pretend not to love. Instead it’s bloated and, whilst hardly ever outright bad, invites Lana’s fantastically jaded delivery to struggle against relentless riptides of melodrama. Still, when it has tracks as imperiously good as Born To Die and Blue Jeans, and those fleeting, understated little rhyming structures (“Sorry that I’m misbehaving - I’m your little harlot, scarlet”), I have to conclude that it’s worth all the frustration. Like some of the best chart pop around, it acknowledges omnipresent, infuriating fads (autotune, the post-electroclash nonsense of Lolita) yet gives the impression it’s tired, and harks back to something better, more distant in time.
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