Lana Del Rey

Honeymoon

An intoxicating listen, ‘Honeymoon’ is designed for the red neon glow of a smoky cabaret bar, a Californian answer to the chanson tradition.

Whatever her intentions, they've led to her most genuinely thrilling music ever.

This isn’t an album stripped of hooks - far from it - but everything’s approached with a sunken, strung-out quality. It’s Lana’s own style, and in a world where the biggest pop acts construct their own universe, hers could be the most distinct and untouchable.

Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.

Honeymoon contains all the usual lyrical themes that have dominated her first two records. It is also as broody and cinematic as ever. Yet, why change what has already proved to be a winning formula? What’s more, it may very well be her most fully realised and complete record to date.

Honeymoon seems comfortingly melancholic and that's the truest sign that it is the fullest execution of Lana Del Rey's grand plan yet.

It was the best of Lana albums, it was the worst of Lana albums. Her voice is immaculate and the music soars.

Honeymoon isn’t quite as fine as Ultraviolence, but that’s less an indictment of the new album than high praise of the older one ... In any case, Del Rey’s rollercoaster of a career seems to have steadied on an impressively high level.

Honeymoon erases most of Del Rey’s modern influences ... to better display her sepulchral voice and highly-stylized phrasing, in which the melisma is so arbitrary, it almost seems determined by throws of the I Ching.

Many of the 14 tracks meander like scenes in a Sophia Coppola film, all variations on depression and scenic pans of sparkling cities and desert expanses.

Del Rey is comfortable with the role she’s chosen to represent, no matter how melodramatic or cliched it may come across at this point in her career.

This album is not just Born To Die 2–though it is closer to that one than it is to Ultraviolence. It certainly is a step forward, but maybe not a step far enough forward.

So little of Honeymoon, beyond early highlight and trolling feint of a lead single “High by the Beach,” differentiates itself from a prevailing, uniformly glacial pace.

At 65-plus minutes' duration, Honeymoon's submarine/somnambulant vibe does rather overstay its welcome.

Overwrote, overlong, and melodramatic to the nth degree, Honeymoon succeeds because it's what we expected: Lana Del Rey doing Lana Del Rey, complete with the faults and the scars.

Whereas her last album had a gently psychedelic and live-off-the-floor feel, Honeymoon plays it safer with “cinematic” arrangements occasionally pumped up (but not excessively so) with modern drum sounds.

There are certain landmarks that characterize a Lana del Rey album: melodrama, nostalgia, and cultural allusions to American myths that are comforting and easily recognizable. Honeymoon has all of that in spades, and Del Rey's dark paradise is becoming more tangible as her career progresses.

The new record marches, with halting steps, toward suffocating, if lovely, dullness. Lana Del Rey overachieves in this regard. Honeymoon becomes interminable about halfway into its runtime.