Lana Del Rey
Born to Die
Interscope Records
Rating: 3.5
Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die includes the melancholic and potent “Video Games” that brought her into fast relevance in the later days of 2011. It is a song that, alone, can elevate an album into the positive echelons of any review. It hits a generational chord that vibrates through and through, as if perfectly synchronized with the melancholic perturbation that is ours, the video game generation. Finally, some real musical depth to the notion.
Her album is good, but it is no generational emotive mirror in music form, and it is not necessarily the coming of any musical prophetess. This is inevitably a disappointment, because who is truly ours? Where is our generational musical reflector, our poet, our melancholic and lyrical boom mic?
We could make cases for many, but it would be easy to doubt every one.
Lana Del Rey presented herself to the world like someone profound and gifted, and then she had the audacity to flop at a “Saturday Night Live” performance and releases an album only moderately excellent. Our greatest sin is hope, they say.
I would not count her out by saying that Born to Die is a flop performance by any means. There are songs here, “Video Games” excluded, that ring with some depth and much catch, like “Blue Jeans” and “National Anthem.” But none, and perhaps this will never be achieved again for her, burn through the soul like “Video Games.”
Of course, she is young and new and there is much time for her to craft something we can canonize in the form of a recurring playlist. There is still hope that the next time she will pull a “Kanye” and force us to not only like her, but love her, it is because she is just so damn good.
Give these tracks a listen: “Video Games,” “Blue Jeans,” “Born to Die”
For Fans Of: Florence and the Machine, Nicola Roberts and Lykke Li
