The first verse ends, "Jim brought me back/Reminded me of when we were kids," as if they'd both been beaten as children, a point that illustrates abuse's typical intergenerational cycle. "He hit me and it felt like a kiss," she quotes the title of the Crystals' notorious 1962 Gerry Goffin/ Carole King-written single eerily produced by Phil Spector.īut there's more going on here than just a button-pushing quotation. Once again Del Rey is in way over her head, this time to a physically abusive beau she blindly adores. Like the others, its largely symphonic arrangement draws from the Shangri-Las' girl-group operetta, Roy Orbison's torch song apocalypse, and the cavernous, echoing sound sculptures of Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western soundtracks, all slowed down further as if narcotized and sinking leagues below the ocean. That's an extraordinarily expressive way to musically capture the vicissitudes of love - particularly for a woman unfairly derided for her supposed lack of musical skill.Īll this is likely to be overshadowed by the controversy just beginning to be stirred up by the album's title track. On another Ultraviolence single, "West Coast," she's both drawn to and yet feels strangely resistant toward her lover, and so the push-pull of their chemistry resembles the ebb and flow of the tide reflected by the way the song's key modulates up and down and back up again just as the tempo shifts between the pulsing verses and the almost weightless chorus, as if she were surfing and tumbling on unpredictable waves of desire and distance. On " Shades of Cool" from her new album Ultraviolence, her voice soars via operatic falsetto high notes to proclaim that her sullen baby blue is "unfixable," as if still straining to lift him up to an impossible ethical standard before she drops back down to the reality signaled by her usual alto for the realization that his heart, however, is "unbreakable." And it does so with similarly exacting distributions of light and shade, density and spaciousness. She's also the rare bird who's built her own gilded cage, and her best work packs the pathos of mid-century Douglas Sirk melodramas - the "women's pictures" covertly more sociological than the guy movies. That's a proper Johnny Cash move, and had the late Man in Black lived long enough to sing the song instead of Del Rey, we'd all be applauding as we did when "Ride" producer Rick Rubin coaxed Cash to cover Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt." Del Rey is the waif who dares to come on like a big bad dead dude. "Been tryin' hard not to get into trouble but I've got a war in my mind," she sings at the bottom of her register in the chorus of "Ride," from 2012's Paradise EP, while a massive orchestra beats and swells like a heart on the verge of bursting. Del Rey shackles herself to her men in a way that sophisticated pop hasn't since the early '60s. Her songs exude the pain her paramours repress through drugs and sport sex, and their implicit subject is addiction. What sets her apart from predecessors in provocation like Madonna is that she celebrates the bacchanalian excess of peers like The Weeknd while immolating herself in themes of co-dependency that make smart people squirm. Del Rey disturbs because she looks the saint while playing the whore, and she's usually at her best when investing both with sincerity. Throughout most of her songs, Del Rey craves sex, excitement, and spiritual redemption with a fire that would otherwise tantalize feminists. Unlike most female acts who woo critics and rockers, Del Rey isn't at all masculine - she's a girly girl who writes almost exclusively about loving bad boys and father figures while appropriating both their bold language and brazen appetites: "In the land of gods and monsters, I was an angel looking to get f- hard," goes a typical Del Rey line that may or may not be autobiographical.
When she signed her first contract, she applied her advance to a New Jersey mobile home, and when her first album got shelved, she worked with addicts and the homeless.
If she were a male musician, her outsider stats would be impeccable: A teenage alcoholic, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant cleaned up in time to study metaphysics with the Jesuits at Fordham University while moonlighting as a Williamsburg folksinger.
#LANA DEL REY SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA DOWNLOAD TV#
But aside from that shaky TV appearance followed by others far more confident, what has she done that's more off-putting than other fast-rising stars? Sing songs in moral shades of grey? Celebrate material wealth with a tone far more ambiguous than that of the average rapper? Mix low-life tropes with a high-life stance? Del Rey more than survived her early attacks: Born to Die's international sales have eclipsed that of most every album this decade.
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