Lana Del Rey has just released her new album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
REVIEW:
I’ve always been happy to buy into the mythology that Lana Del Rey has built around herself. Since breaking out a decade ago with her debut Born to Die she’s presented herself as a doomed romantic jarringly out of time and most certainly out of place amongst our current batch of pop stars.
She wore ball gowns and the aura of old school, Hollywood glamour. Her songs were cinematic, characterised by haunting piano, swelling movie strings and her deep, narcotised croon and whispered falsetto. The effect was hypnotic. Her modern concerns and attitudes sprawled on a fading photograph.
Del Rey’s sound, at its best, is soaked in sepia and nostalgia for an America that has long since disappeared. That is if it ever really existed at all. It’s the aural equivalent of our collective television memories and the grainy news footage of the era. It is large chrome-infested automobiles and white picket fences, Sinatra and his Rat Pack swinging through Las Vegas, the assassination of JFK.
Like surrealist film director David Lynch, Del Rey idolises a very particular slice of the American Pie, reinterpreting it for today while also obsessing over the rotten fruit baked within its outwardly tasty crust. In Lynch’s work, it surfaces as oddities and nightmares, their meaning flickering in and out of view to be both unnervingly mindbending yet strangely cohesive.
Del Rey, on the other hand, is the inscrutable puzzle of her work. Moments of autobiographical revelations bubble through her sonic broth but are quickly stirred back into the thick soup before you can get too much of a handle on her. If you follow gossip and Insta she’s scattered breadcrumbs throughout her work for you to nibble on. She’s buried herself beneath the sonic and visual accoutrements of an age she never experienced and that is largely shaped by our modern interpretation of it.
Her new album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd - the lack of a question mark denoting this trivia tidbit as statement not query - is no departure. It is unlikely to win Del Rey any new fans. Like its title, it is wordy, difficult and way too long.
But it is also the most personal and revealing she’s gotten. She doesn’t entirely blow the smoke away or dust off her music’s cobwebs, but she is bringing you closer into her world.
She namechecks her family, literally takes you to a sermon and openly muses on love and marriage and whether she would be a good parent. She looks to religion, God, spirituality, death and sex for answers. The nihilist has reached the end of the boulevard and is gazing into the abyss and questioning who she sees gazing back.
Del Rey’s signature foggy haze wafts over the majority of the album. Combined with the muted, reverb-drenched piano, which leads most of the 16 songs, and the dusty orchestral strings the record has a dreamy and half-remembered atmosphere. Many songs don’t have what you’d recognise as a chorus. Her verses are full of words and melodies that slither over and around the music. It is at once meticulously crafted while also sounding casual and impromptu. It opens with gospel backing singers fluffing their words and includes what sounds like a covertly recorded interlude of her actual pastor preaching.
Ocean Blvd is frequently stunning. It conjures an atmosphere like no other record since, well, her last one, 2019′s Blue Bannisters. It is moody, romantic, spiritual, sensual, questioning, resigned, playful and often quite beautiful. Its opening run of four songs is unstoppable, beginning with The Grants, where she muses on her family, Grant being her given name, segueing into the pleading anaesthesia of the title track before the contemplative and touching ballad Sweet and then rolling into the show-stopping, NSFW standout track A & W. A seven-minute long masterpiece that starts off dreamily/nightmarishly stalking seedy hotels and shock revelations before dramatically switching gears into a booming, minimal modern-day anthem.
Bringing in synths and hip-hop beats isn’t new to Del Rey, but rarely does it work as ambitiously and jaw-droppingly well as it does here. Indeed, towards the end of the album on the track Peppers she tries again, only this time the wild experimentation blows up in her face like a science experiment going wrong in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.
The next stunner is the haunting Candy Necklace, a collaboration with jazz supremo Jon Baptiste. Unlike A & W, it instead doubles down on Del Rey’s strengths to present a moment of hazy widescreen beauty. The childlike Paris, Texas is equally as enthralling with Del Rey staying in her higher register, making it a rarity in her catalogue.
If she’d ended on the cinematic country-tinged duet Let Light In with Father John Misty, the album would be an unchallengeable triumph. Unfortunately, instead of floating off and leaving you dazed and drowsy as if you’ve just woken up from an afternoon nap and are trying to piece together the fragments of your dreams, Ocean Blvd continues for another four songs. All of which are not good and stick out from the preceding 12 songs the same way her occasionally shocking lyrics jump out of the old-timey, cinematic glaze.
Mashing her dark Hollywood noir with producer Jack Antonoff’s Springsteen-aping band Bleachers is a strike out, Fishtail sounds like any number of breathy minimal-pop tunes that use Lorde’s Royals as their guiding light, Peppers features one of the worst vocal hooks of the year as Del Rey bounces over a trap beat and the skittering Latina vibes of Taco Track x VB sees her swerving off the boulevard and straight into the ocean to mercifully bring the album to a close.
The inclusion of these four songs is as bewildering as the answers Del Rey seeks in the preceding songs. Nevertheless, Ocean Blvd is undoubtedly one of the albums of the year. Right up until it isn’t.
* Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is streaming on all major music platforms and is available on vinyl now.