Lana Del Rey

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Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey "Born To Die" album

- Release date : January 2012 -

Born to Die is the second studio album and major label debut by American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey. The album was released on January 27, 2012 through Stranger Records. After signing a record contract with Stranger in June 2011, the singer released her debut single, "Video Games", which is considered as the one that propelled the singer's online popularity. The album's second single, "Born to Die", was released on December 30, 2011.

"Born To Die" album tracks and lyrics

"Born To Die" album reviews

If you want an explanation for the unlikely rise of Lana Del Rey, it isn’t that hard to find. Ignore accusations of cynical marketing and inauthenticity, or speculation about surgery and Daddy’s money – that’s not important. And don’t get distracted by the YouTube statistics or the online hyperbole, this isn’t about new media. It’s about something older and more mysterious than that; the extraordinary, resilient power of the pop song. For all of her trashy Americana and startling beauty, if Del Rey hadn’t arrived last summer with a song as luminously beautiful as Video Games, none of this would be happening.

So the only truly important question about Born to Die is whether there’s more where that came from. Cynics look away: the answer is an emphatic yes. Nothing else quite matches Video Games’ eerie perfection of form and melody – after all, 99% of singers go an entire career without finding one song that good – but several run it perilously close, while revealing there’s more to her than the love-stunned torch singer of Video Games.

What makes Born to Die so richly fascinating – and what marks Del Rey out from the standard issue "I’m hot, you’re hot" pop starlet – is her preoccupation with Hollywood archetypes of American femininity, and her ability to shape-shift between them. So, on the stately, bloodstained title-track, Del Rey plays femme fatale, deliciously stoned and doomed, with an imperious vocal to match. On the addictive, sugar-rushing Off to the Races she’s trailer trash living the high life, her vocal veering deftly between husky cynicism and hiccupping glee; while on the tender This Is What Makes Us Girls she’s the poor little rich girl looking melancholically back on youthful hedonism.

It all reaches its apotheosis on National Anthem where Del Rey, dissatisfied with merely being an all-American girl, becomes America itself, offering up deadpan slogans like "money is the reason we exist" before demanding utter patriotic devotion on the swaggering chorus. If that sounds knowing that’s because it is, not to mention intelligent, ambitious, and more interesting than anything Adele is likely to write even by the time her inevitable 72 collection hits the shelves of the future. It’s also brilliantly realised, thanks to Del Rey’s extraordinary delivery, her ability to slip from deep-toned haughtiness to breathless ecstasy to velvety vamping – often in the same gorgeous melody.

Born to Die isn’t perfect: it slumps slightly towards the end, and the glossy trip-hop production grows wearying on lesser gothic melodramas like Dark Paradise. But it’s the most distinctive and assured debut since Glasvegas’ eponymous disc in 2008, and makes you desperate to see where she goes from here. Del Rey’s defenders can take a break: Born to Die does their job better than they could hope to.

*** by Jaime Gill, BBC Music ***

It's hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Lana Del Rey. She's hardly the first pop star in history to indulge in a spot of pragmatic reinvention that muddies her comfortable background, but you'd certainly think she was. You can barely hear the music over the carping, which appears to be getting louder as her debut album approaches: a cynic might say that's just as well, given the recent Saturday Night Live appearance in which she demonstrated her uncanny mastery of the vocal style deployed by Ian Brown during the Stone Roses' later years – she honked like the foghorn on Portland Bill lighthouse. But one off-key TV spot is surely not a career-ending disaster. Perhaps the arrival of Born to Die will silence the controversy and shift attention to the songs.

Or perhaps not. There's something impressive about her desire to brazen it out, but you do wonder at the wisdom of including Radio, one of those how-do-you-like-me-now? songs in which the singer revisits their terrible struggle to achieve fame. "No one even knows how hard life was," she sings, "no one even knows what life was like," which does rather invite the response: indeed not, but given that your father was not only extremely wealthy but so supportive that he took to the pages of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise to promote your debut album I'll hazard a guess at (a) probably not that hard and (b) basically quite nice.

There's always the chance that she's playing a character, although that seems doubtful, because when Lana Del Rey is in character, she really lets you know about it. The one truly disappointing thing about Born to Die isn't the sound, which understandably sticks fast to the appealing blueprint from Video Games and Blue Jeans: sumptuous orchestration, twangs of Twin Peaks-theme guitar and bum-bum-TISH drums. Nor is it her voice, which is fine: a bit reedy on the high notes, but nothing to get you reaching for the earplugs. It's the lyrics, which in contrast to Video Games's beguiling description of a mundane love affair, are incredibly heavy-handed in their attempts to convince you that Lana Del Rey is the doomed but devoted partner of a kind of Athena poster bad boy, all white vest, cheekbones and dangling ciggie. The reckless criminality of their lifestyle is expressed via hip-hop slang – "yo", "imma ride or die", and, a little Ali Gishly, "booyah" – and the depth of their love through romance-novel cliches ("you are my one true love"). It's Mills and Booyah.

The problem is that Del Rey doesn't have the lyrical equipment to develop a persona throughout the album. After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she'll love him 'til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.

The best thing to do is ignore the lyrics; easy enough given how magnificently most of the melodies have been constructed. Video Games sounded like a unique single, but as it turns out, it was anything but a one-off: the album is packed with similarly beautiful stuff. National Anthem soars gloriously away from a string motif that sounds not unlike that sampled on the Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony. There's something effortless about the melodies of Diet Mountain Dew and Dark Paradise: they just sweep the listener along with them. The quality is high throughout, which is presumably what you get if you assemble a crack team of co-writers, including Heart FM king Rick Nowels, author of Ronan Keating's Life Is a Rollercoaster, Dido's White Flag and Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is a Place on Earth.

You could argue that his presence recontextualises Born to Die, drawing it away from the world of the indie singer-songwriter she was initially thought to inhabit and firmly into the mainstream. It fits better there, where no one bores on about authenticity and lyrics matter less than whether your songs' hooks sink deep into the listener's skin. What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul. If you concentrate too hard on her attempts to conjure that up, it just sounds a bit daft. What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough.

*** by Alexis Petridis, The Guardian UK ***

I was initially puzzled by the accusations of inauthenticity that were hurled with such vehemence and frequency at Lana Del Rey (née Elizabeth Grant) in the wake of her meteoric rise to It Girl status last year. Yes, her self-styled "gangsta Nancy Sinatra" persona doesn't exactly jibe with reports that her career was bankrolled by Daddy Del Rey. And I guess we're supposed to lament the fact that, unlike Amy Winehouse, she doesn't appear to have a predilection for dope or booze to back up her supposed bad-girl bona fides. But since when exactly has "authenticity" ever been a criterion in pop music?

More legitimately damning were the interviews and live performances that began to emerge in the weeks and months following the singer's inevitable courtship with the majors. Del Rey isn't completely ineloquent, but she displays a lack of understanding of her source material, functioning almost entirely on the surface of a persona that could have been concocted in one of David Lynch's wet dreams. The generous interpretation is that her creative choices are instinctual; the more popular, cynical point of view is that her aesthetics are purely superficial. Her speaking voice is high-pitched and girly, making her vie to be taken seriously by singing in a lower, sultrier range feel all the more contrived when she struggles to hit those notes in a live setting, as she infamously did on Saturday Night Live earlier this month, her enunciation twisted into an unintentional parody of Marlene Dietrich.

The enormous hype, to which Slant has unapologetically contributed, was bound to unfairly result in a backlash. To wit, her much-buzzed-about but abruptly postponed showcase in New York last fall pointed to a studio creation who might not be ready for primetime. But it seems unjust to hold an artist like Del Rey to a higher standard than, say, Britney Spears, who outsources everything including her own dancing, or Katy Perry, who even mimes her flute diddling, by sheer virtue of the fact that she makes pop music that's "serious"—or at least greater than that of the lowest common denominator.

Stacked with the singles "Video Games," "Blue Jeans," and the title track, the first half of Del Rey's Born to Die alone practically guarantees it a spot among the year's best, and it's only January. Del Rey's vocal performances are at turns haunting and vampy: She uses her impressive range to dazzling effect on "Blue Jeans," comparing her delinquent lover to both cancer and her favorite sweater in what seems like one swooning breath, and the album's tour de force, "Off to the Races," a theme song for the gold-digging coquette of some imaginary hip-hop film noir that juxtaposes a full orchestra and machine-gun barks straight out of the Portishead songbook.

It's easy to hear why Del Rey started singing in a lower register. Early, radio-friendly versions of songs like "National Anthem" and the unexpectedly insightful and poignant "This Is What Makes Us Girls" were so lightweight that Del Rey's Kewpie-doll performances barely kept them from floating away. The new versions, including a punched-up rendition of the formerly more chill "Diet Mtn Dew," are given the same lush-strings-meet-hard-beats treatment. Ironically, the album's sole weakness is the strength of its immaculate production, which can be a bit overwhelming over the course of 12 tracks (15 on the deluxe edition). The little flourishes that made "Video Games" and "Blue Jeans" feel so special are diluted by sheer repetition. A distorted, ghostly whine reprised from previous tracks distracts from "Million Dollar Man," an otherwise solid, bluesy ballad reminiscent of Fiona Apple, but most of the songs are strong enough to withstand such excess, and in many cases are accentuated by it.

The repetition of those elements in marriage with recurring themes of chasing paper ("Money is the reason we exist/Everybody knows it/It's a fact," Del Rey cheekily declares on "National Anthem") and escaping the fuzz is what makes Born to Die one of the more cohesive pop albums in recent memory. "Radio" is the kind of self-referential, hard-knocks track that will only further bait Del Rey's critics, and she fares much better when she sings in (or about) characters, as she does on "Carmen." A "Coney Island Queen" with a fondness for slipping in and out of red dresses is referenced on both that track and the first-person "Off to the Races," suggesting Del Rey isn't trying to pass herself off as something she's not, but rather, doing what the finest singer-songwriters have always done: "blurring the lines between real and the fake," as she says on "National Anthem." Pop music is all about artifice and escape, and "Lana Del Rey" is indeed an act.

In Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, an insufferably pedantic academic played by Michael Sheen diagnoses Allen proxy Owen Wilson with nostalgia syndrome, a common neurosis that condemns the afflicted to a lifetime of pining for a rose-tinted version of the past that probably never existed. Del Rey may be the pop-star equivalent of a teenage girl naïvely playing dress up in her grandmother's vintage clothing and singing into a hairbrush that conveniently looks like an old-fashioned microphone, but that doesn't make Born to Die any less close to pop perfection.

*** by Sal Cinquemani, Slant Magazine ***