Lana Del Rey

Ultraviolence

It’s a strung out, tear-drenched collection, beginning epic with opener ‘Cruel World’ and only getting more dramatic as it progresses.

Ultraviolence is a beautiful argument for her relevance and her potential longevity.

With Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey remains a singular figure in music, sounding (and addressing the idea of authenticity) like no one else.

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.

Ultraviolence is a melancholy crawl through doomed romance, incorrigible addictions, blown American dreams.

As an album to invest in, feel sentimental about, or be genuinely thrilled by, Ultraviolence falls short. Take it simply as a sumptuously-presented pop record, though, and you have to wonder if you’ll hear a better one this year.

Ultraviolence prioritizes mood over innovation, classicism over experimentalism, and is better for it.

It is musically defter and subtler than the previous album, if not entirely dissimilar in terms of atmosphere. The pace is slow, the colours are faded and the feeling of doomed romance hangs around the record like bequiffed ne’er-do-wells about a bowling alley.

What comes through clearest is a coherency defined by the distinct reluctance to do much to unsettle a trajectory that’s taken Del Rey from complete unknown through blog-hyped ‘newcomer’ to legitimate pop superstar.

Del Rey sounds alone, which is apt because these are some lonely damn songs. She’s often sung about being stuck with absent, uncaring men and loving them anyway, and Ultraviolence doesn’t change that.

Ultraviolence finds her stripping away much of the sonic, if not thematic, pretense...or at least substituting it with a new one.

It’s a record that does an awful lot of things ‘wrong’ and is all the more beguiling for it.

The dynamic scarcely shifts ... but that’s the point: get this tangled up in blue, there’s no way out.

The line between self-aware irony and tragically conforming to type is thin, though, her knowing winks getting stuck in a tangle of false eyelashes, and ultimately undermining what had the potential to be a powerful artistic statement. 

Absorbing though Ultraviolence is, the album could certainly do with a dollop more musical levity. Without the hip-hop beats that peppered her first album, the songs here lack a sprinkling of brashness – a little of the Kim and Kanye touch would have helped.

Even though there are half-a-dozen high points here, the stylistic shifts that kept Born to Die complicated are missing. The end result is stylish and cogent but, as a consequence, perhaps a teensy bit samey.

Del Rey’s problem isn’t fickleness, but over-consistency. Which is to say that Ultraviolence is more of the same, but less.

On Born To Die, desolation was the subject matter, but on Ultraviolence it is the method. This record is stark, isolated and at times unnervingly frozen.

Throughout Ultraviolence, there's a sense of musical haziness that rests in a safe zone that Del Rey either can't or won't escape from. The mid-tempo songs have elements of woozy European pop with a dose of baroque pop, yet at the same time aren't pop at all. 

The ultimate downfall of Ultraviolence, though, is that it fails to craft its own identity or forge its own creative vision.

It's perhaps her greatest failing that you're left with not an ounce of sympathy, or investment, in the seedy, gritty yarns she's so desperate to recount.