Lana Del Rey, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd ★★★☆☆
How you feel about Lana Del Rey’s ninth album will depend a great deal on how you already feel about Del Rey. It is over 77 minutes long, and features 16 tracks of sonorous piano, soft orchestration, slow tempos, occasional tickles of trap beats, and breathily soft singing of meandering verses on her usual range of topics: bad men, good sex and whether it is possible to achieve happiness amidst the everyday superficialities of privileged American life. All of which is overshadowed by the conviction that all that is flesh will someday wither and fade. In summary: dating, f—ing, shopping and death, to be more succinct than Del Rey herself is inclined to be.
It is by far the most self-indulgent work yet of an artist who has made her career a monument to self-absorption. By using her considerable songcraft as a mirror to her own neuroses she has also held a mirror to our own neurotic times. Indeed, since struggling pop wannabe Lizzie Grant artfully re-branded herself with media-savvy panache as Lana Del Rey in 2011, she has arguably become the defining artist of the selfie-generation.
The relationship between her image and music is so tightly fashioned, it is almost impossible to judge to what extent Del Rey is style over substance, or cleverly employing style as a distraction from the true substance beneath. For an artist who maintained an aura of mystery almost unheard of in the social media age, she herself has regularly pronounced that she has nothing to hide. “They say there’s irony in the music,” she sings on Fingertips, then adds: “It’s a tragedy.” Well, there is certainly tragedy in her music. But is there irony?
“I’m not that smart but I’ve got things to say,” Del Rey teasingly proclaims on Fishtail, playing the wide-eyed ingenue again, even as the 37-year-old’s music gets increasingly sophisticated, and her image manipulation increasingly complex. “You wanted me sadder,” she sadly, sadly breathes on a sad little song about a man sadly not turning up for a date, and I wonder if there is anyone on earth who really does want her sadder? Indeed, is it possible to be any sadder than Lana Del Rey in a blue mood? Yet there is a shard of something dangerous lurking inside such sharply turned vignettes, the ice-cold vengeance of being the one to tell the story and expose the petty cruelties of modern dating.
Even as I write this review, I find I am getting sucked deeper into Del Rey’s world, considering her songs from different perspectives, beguiled all the while by her easy way with a melody, her rolling rhymes, clever turns of phrase, seductive vocals and subtle production touches. But I should also confess that the first time I listened to this album in full, my brain wanted to crawl out of my skull with boredom. The songs are almost provocatively shapeless, the pace almost daringly unhurried, the tone so subdued it sounds like the album itself is staggering about in a valium stupor. Some of the lyrics are so conversationally baggy they appear to have been improvised on the spot, notably Kintsugi (an overstretched six minute metaphor about Japanese pottery being the secret of life) and Fingertips (five minutes 48 seconds of fretting about her family and the mystery of death).
Secrets are yielded slowly, albeit if you bear with it there is usually something to pull you back in for further contemplation. The darkly absorbing, seven-minute, two-part A&W lets Del Rey bare her fangs at the judgement of women by their appearance (“If I told you that I was raped / Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”) whilst the curiously titled Grandfather Please Stand on the Shoulders of my Father While He’s Deep Sea Fishing challenges perceptions of her as an industry construct, “Frankenstein’s wet dream”, whilst calling for spiritual protection for herself and her family. Opening track The Grants asserts the family theme, and the album is full of references to those she loves, and some she has lost, almost as if she is trying to cast magical spells of musical protection.
To get to the good stuff, though, you have to wade through interludes longer than most people’s songs, including over four minutes of a happy clappy preacher’s sermon that sounds like it might have been secretly recorded in an echoing church on a microphone stuffed under a pillow. The pacing of the album is dreadful, with one dawdling ballad sequenced after another. Despite the presence of hitmaking collaborator Jack Antonoff, the project cries out for objective oversight to cut through the waffle.
Rolling Stone recently hailed Del Rey as the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century. She has certainly been one of the most prolific and influential, whose downbeat Americana hip hop blend has impacted Billie Eilish, Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers and even Taylor Swift. The excesses of Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd rather puts such lofty claims to the test. It is either the sound of someone who has begun to believe her own publicity, or who has stopped caring what anyone else thinks and is determined to follow her muse wherever it wanders. There’s a fine album lurking amidst the indulgence but listeners have their work cut out trying to locate it. NMC
