Lana Del Rey was launched to international stardom with her 2012 debut album Born To Die, a fine record which enjoyed such spectacular success largely because of the wondrous ‘Video Games’. One of the finest singles of the decade so far, the song – a swooning, magisterial ballad – achieved the not insignificant feat of summing up the tech-obsessed, celeb-fixated, selfie-saturated zeitgeist.
Obviously a songwriter and performer of considerable talent, the central question hanging over Del Rey is whether she has the ability to adapt and change with the times, and to continually reinvent herself, or whether ‘Video Games’ was merely a flash in the pan.
Largely dealing in the same style of darkly romantic torch-pop for which she has become renowned, Ultraviolence (actually Del Rey’s third album, when you factor in 2010’s unheralded, self-titled debut) maintains a holding pattern, and can be read as Born To Die Part 2. In truth, the album would feel samey were it not for the singer’s exceptional melodic flair and deft lyrical touch.
She has already courted controversy with the record’s title track, which interpolates the infamous Crystals refrain, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”. The debate over whether this is a daring piece of artistic expression or tiresome attention-seeking will no doubt rage in the blogosphere for some time to come. Elsewhere, Del Rey delivers a fine hipster satire on the orchestral dream-pop of ‘Brooklyn Baby’ (“I sing like Lou Reed/ I’ve got feathers in my hair/ I sing Beat poetry”), croons a paean to all-conquering success on the self-explanatory ‘Money Power Glory’, and makes wryly humorous cultural observations on the strikingly tilted ‘Fucked My Way Up To The Top’.
It’s fitting that Del Rey featured on the soundtrack of Buz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby: if there is any writer to whom the singer is aesthetically matched, it’s Fitzgerald. Both are fascinated by decadence, excess and lost youth. These themes surface again on the finest song on Ultraviolence, the penultimate ‘Old Money’, which boasts strikingly vivid imagery (“Blue hydrangea, cold cash, divine/ Cashmere, cologne and white sunshine/ Red racing cars, Sunset and Vine”), as well as some haunting piano notes.
Ultraviolence may be too one-paced to be accused of greatness, but as a cultural statement from one of the more interesting stars in the pop firmament, it’ll do just fine.
Out Now.