Lana Del Ray - Ultraviolence

Lana Del Ray's last album, her second (first, as far as most are concerned) got her a lot of fans because of its melodramatic production. It sounded what I imagine an angsty fourteen year old would picture as the perfect soundtrack to a dramatic movie, which is probably the reason I've never managed to listen to it all the way through. But it brought her into the mainstream: the same woman who was name dropping Kurt Cobain as a key influence in interviews was being placed on radio line-ups alongside Rihanna, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj etc. The fact that Ultraviolence doesn't paint her as a 'tortured pop diva' but is moody and introspective, is both much more fitting a skin for Lana and also very likely to piss off a lot of the people who bought her first album: I've already seen crazed fans denounce Ultraviolence like it never happened.

I guess it's one of the virtues of not being a crazed fan then that I could listen to Ultraviolence for what it is, while also not exactly going ga ga over it. What it is is a 'personal album' in the same style as Frank Ocean's and Lorde's most recent releases: slow paced, meandering, bass heavy mood pieces that back up mostly self-questioning lyrics. All three of these albums sound like a wall of sound crashing through the speakers, stopping one from calling this music 'minimalistic' - although the compositions are simple enough that you focus entirely on the lyrics. Which is obviously the point: here is three artists in control of their albums, or at least making the producers calling the shots seem more invisible than usual.

Yet both Ocean and Lorde sold themselves on having unique personalities inside their genres - their stripped down albums, getting up close with the artists, was exactly what their fans wanted. Del-Ray doesn't invoke the same excitement on her own, which is probably why the best moments on Ultraviolence are the most self-obsessed. Highlights sound like angrily scribbled diary entries. Take the lyrics of Brooklyn Baby:

Well, my boyfriend's in a band/He plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed

 I've got feathers in my hair/I get down to Beat poetry

And my jazz collection's rare/I can play most anything

 I'm a Brooklyn baby/I'm a Brooklyn baby 

I'd slant most singers for such self-indulgence but for Lana it seems like her biggest selling point. All of her vocals sound hollow and dampened under a veil of production, a risky move for a singer who's most noticeable virtue has been her melodramatic choruses. The whole thing shouldn't work actually, but managing to hold the mood for the entire album creates a space in which all tracks make sense, even if most are worthless on their own.

Obvious miscalculations: a song that takes a sarcastic jab at some well known rumors about the singer titled Fucked My Way Up To The Top and a purposefully self-obsessed piece of boasting titled Money Power Glory which I imagine Lana expected to work out as a Kanye-style ego examination; both jokes that (because they both come in the middle of an album that spends its time creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that includes no fun or adventurousness) don't land. Actually most tracks don't land, they only hold up the mood which Lana wants to convey. Ultraviolence doesn't make a showcase of Lana Del-Ray's talents, only shows what talents it is she wants to possess.