Lana Del Rey, the creation of singer and songwriter Lizzy Grant, is all alone. She’s an utterly distinctive figure in popular music—not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely. Where her last full-length, the frequently terrible Born to Die, tried on different moods and looked at her character from a few angles, Ultraviolence finds one feeling—a seedy, desperate, hyper-romanticized sense of isolation and loss—and blows it up to drive-in screen proportions, saturating the color riding the blue crest of sadness for the better part of an hour. Whether or not you want to take this particular ride will largely depend on how much stock you put in “authenticity,” your tolerance for Del Rey’s vocal tics, and your reflexive response to her lyrics.
Creating a semi-fictional delivery system for your creative ideas is nothing new, but few have had Del Rey’s commitment to the idea—imagine Madonna sticking with Breathless Mahoney for multiple album cycles. This far in, after so many interviews and so much media attention, we don’t know all that much about Lana Del Rey, and we’re not sure what we’re told is real. She’s become a screen onto which we project our desire and/or our loathing. With Ultraviolence, Del Rey has found new synergy between the character she presents to the world and the content of the songs.
Gone are annoying trifles like Born to Die’s “Carmen” and “Diet Mountain Dew”; in their place are slow, atmospheric songs filled with theatrical melancholy and a parade of women in trouble who mourn for men who treat them badly yet somehow remain irresistible. The lyrics are studded with her trademark iconography: “he hit me and it felt like a kiss”; “the sun also rises”; “talking about my generation”; a reference to “Sunset and Vine” and another to “strange weather.” But here she’s found the perfect musical vehicle for her vision. Ultraviolence sounds tragic and beautiful—darkly-shaded ballads are what she was created to make, and this album is nothing but, a Concept Album from a Concept Human.
The first section of the album is so gorgeous and rich, Ultraviolence at first seems better than it is. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who produced much of the record, turns out to be Del Rey's ideal creative partner, crafting lush walls of sound that evoke her favorite cultural era, a time when the prim and surface-level 1960s were just starting their slide into drug-fueled decadence. “Cruel World” is a six-minute dirge that 30 years ago might have been sung by Bonnie Tyler, its twangy guitars and thudding drums exploding at just the right moments. The title track’s gorgeous chorus dresses up a song where love and physical abuse are intertwined. Del Rey’s angelic interval leap on the chorus of “Shades of Cool” is a new addition to her small array of vocal effects, bringing to mind the faux-Asian sweep of Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” mixed with the song that lured the prince in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. They’re songs that would make no sense if anyone else sang them. In this way, and a few others, she draws inspiration from rap music, broadcasting her obsessions and forcing you to engage with the persona first and the content of the songs second.
It’s an impressive opening shot, and there are a few moments in this sequence that make you want to sit back and say, “Hold on, is this for real?” But then comes “Brooklyn Baby”, a song that references Lou Reed, a rare jazz collection, feathers in hair, the “freedom land of the ’70s,” and “churning out novels like beat poetry on amphetamines.” Is Del Rey taking the piss, making fun of lifestyle accessories as a source of identity? Or is she celebrating these icons, the way she has so many others, reveling in the colorful tapestry that is American popular culture?
Turns out these are the wrong questions. When lines like these pop up on the record, I find myself chuckling, sometimes laughing out loud, which might seem odd on an album about sadness. But that says something about how strange Del Rey's music can be, and the internal coherence of the worlds she creates. These songs don’t ask you to respond in any particular way; they evoke heartbreak one moment and they’re ridiculous the next, and those qualities don’t cancel each other out. It’s entertainment, camp, and the ambiguity of it all, nurtured by the cool distance of Lana Del Rey’s image, is a huge part of the music’s appeal. Those who really hate what she’s about—and there are a lot of these people—look for something in music that she has no interest in providing. To enjoy what she does, you have to give yourself over to her media-saturated fantasy and put the everyday on hold, and you also have to lay aside pop radio’s typically sunny affirmations.
But this thing Lana Del Rey is going for isn’t easy to sustain, and it starts to go south during the back half of Ultraviolence. The album grows tiresome somewhere during the stretch where “Pretty When You Cry” leads to “Money Power Glory” and then on to “Fucked My Way Up to the Top”. The melodies are a little less interesting and, instead of melodramatic fables, she settles for button-pushing. It’s also wearying to spend this much time in the presence of this particular character. The masochism, the self-hatred, the drugs, the emotional world filtered through the tragic figures American teenagers are drawn to gets old. You can feel Lana Del Rey inching into territory where she’s daring you not to like her, and by the time you get to the Ultraviolence bonus track “Florida Kilos”, a Harmony Korine co-write that might as well be called Spring Breakers: The Audiobook, you begin to remember why many people find the whole project repellant. Still, it’d be wrong to overlook the many things Ultraviolence does well, and how sui generis Lana Del Rey is. She’s a pop music original full-stop, and there are not nearly enough of those around.
