Del Rey’s voice flourishes. Inside the album’s big, vintage swing, she sings herself into places that Born to Die, with its pop veneer, couldn’t touch.
The addition of producer Dan Auerbach enhances Ultra’s air of everyday menace, and finds Del Rey digging deeper.
Ultraviolence, a collection of mid-century ballads spiked with blues-rock, is a stunning accomplishment. Its eleven songs whimper and howl, soothe and taunt, hypnotize and thrill.
Del Rey’s work has depth as well as glamour, and the timeless quality of Ultraviolence suggests that her work will outlast many of her more gimmick-oriented contemporaries.
She sings about drugs, cars, money, and the bad boys she's always falling for, and while there remains a sepia-toned mid-century flavor to many of these songs, LDR is no longer fronting like a thugged-out Bettie Davis.
All in all Ultraviolence is a great album, showing Del Rey’s progression from hipster upstart to soulful and emotional chanteuse. Musically interesting, all be it samey, it is a body of work she can be proud of and the perfect lazy summer album of 2014.
This time, her strangely aloof detachment works much better with her atmospheric ballads than it did on her debut.
For all the improvements on Born to Die, the problem with Ultraviolence remains the same: Lana Del Rey keeps repeating herself.
It’s a strung out, tear-drenched collection, beginning epic with opener ‘Cruel World’ and only getting more dramatic as it progresses.
With Ultraviolence, Lana Del Rey remains a singular figure in music, sounding (and addressing the idea of authenticity) like no one else.
Ultraviolence is a beautiful argument for her relevance and her potential longevity.
Ultraviolence asserts that as a songwriter, she has complete control of her craft, deciding on songs far less flashy or immediate but still uniquely captivating
In a career fraught with obsessions over the perfection-imperfection dichotomy, it turns out to be a blessing that she put pop and its various pressures on the backburner just to deliver some real summertime sadness.
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 prioritizes mood over innovation, classicism over experimentalism, and is better for it.
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.
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.
It’s a record that does an awful lot of things ‘wrong’ and is all the more beguiling for it.
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.
Ultraviolence is a melancholy crawl through doomed romance, incorrigible addictions, blown American dreams.
The dynamic scarcely shifts ... but that’s the point: get this tangled up in blue, there’s no way out.
Del Rey’s problem isn’t fickleness, but over-consistency. Which is to say that Ultraviolence is more of the same, but less.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ultraviolence is an album that received a lot of controversy for its lyrical themes and more aggressive way of showing the singer's experiences through music, for example we have a phrase that shocks many people at the beginning of the project which is "He hit me and it felt like a kiss " (on the song "Ultraviolence") demonstrating that the singer suffered aggressively in toxic relationships. The only thing I don’t understand are people who think she’s ... read more
I will literally fight you over this album… You mix Lana’s best vocals with superb writing and you get a hazy and freaky experience that knocks your socks off.
We live in a cruel world where this album doesn’t hit ‘Must Hear’ status.
This album is frustrating.
Cruel World, I'm sorry, but I just cannot like, and I know how loved this song is. Why does she rhyme crazy with crazy three times in the chorus? It just annoys me.
Then we get to literal heaven. Every song from Ultraviolence to Pretty When You Cry is an absolute banger. If it was just these songs we'd be looking at a strong 90.
And then... ugh. Money Power Glory just takes a complete dip, and the two songs after it are so boring as well.
At least we end on a ... read more
1 | Cruel World 6:39 | 87 |
2 | Ultraviolence 4:11 | 88 |
3 | Shades of Cool 5:42 | 90 |
4 | Brooklyn Baby 5:51 | 90 |
5 | West Coast 4:16 | 92 |
6 | Sad Girl 5:17 | 83 |
7 | Pretty When You Cry 3:54 | 85 |
8 | Money Power Glory 4:30 | 80 |
9 | Fucked My Way Up To the Top 3:32 | 76 |
10 | Old Money 4:31 | 84 |
11 | The Other Woman 3:01 | 82 |
#3 | / | Complex |
#3 | / | Dazed |
#3 | / | Slant Magazine |
#4 | / | Amazon |
#4 | / | Entertainment Weekly |
#5 | / | Idolator |
#6 | / | TIME |
#6 | / | Vulture |
#7 | / | Cosmopolitan |
#7 | / | Rolling Stone |