“We both know . . .that it’s not fashionable to love me’ Lana’s smirking opening vocal on the titular ‘Honeymoon’ is as much a proclamation of the confidence 2014’s ‘Ultraviolence’ lacked and 2011’s ‘Born to Die’ pretended to have, as it is a no doubt long and graceful middle-finger to her critics. The US media love a character and Lana was unfortunate enough to have that character exposed as fraudulent, yet there remains a note of authenticity in her artifice.
Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, even Nicki Manaj, all represent strong individuals with contrived facades and yet have not suffered the criticism Lana has for her faded pin-up languor. Elizabeth Grant (Del Rey) may not occupy the same space as the aforementioned, and perhaps that is the issue, not having the Dali-esque aesthetic of Gaga, or the kooky sex-kitten appeal of Katy Perry or even the outlandish cartoon hyper-sexuality of Manaj, it is difficult for the American public to recognise her creation as anything as self-aware as contemporaries like Taylor Swift.
However, her wanton, smoky, Stepford-moll shtick still fascinates and is strangely more compelling than the virginal high-school daydream ‘Born to Die’ presented us with. It’s a touch of old Hollywood glamour in an age of social media fish-tanks, tattoos and hashtags. There is still a mystery to Lana, and thus began my enduring love affair with her songs and her serpents. I confess I couldn’t stand Born to Die at first, it took me months to learn and understand its appeal, likewise Ultraviolence alienated me before I bent my knees at the alter of its dark, bleak magic. I desired, on some subconscious level, the follow-up be a repeat, to spin me more leaden tales of Lana’s pageant-girl misery.
Thankfully for both my musical appreciation and Lana’s artistic progression, her gauzy floatings took her swaying hips firmly into a noir-esque speakeasy where a dame in a red dress breathed soft sighs into a steel-clad microphone and hard-bitten sugar daddies watched with impassive whiskey-dull eyes and thick-fingered indifference as her ethereal jazz dribbled from shadowed nooks. The narrative was familiar, the voice recognisably anguished and the bad men in pin stripes instead of biker cuts; but now there was an added maturity to her self-absorbed, and, undoubtedly self-inflicted, narcissistic sufferings. The red dress draped the body of a woman, the veiled eyes looked out upon the world with their customary cynicism, yet there was a new power in her wearied glance and a sharpness; a hardness that had been lacking in her previous albums where Lana seemed complicit in her victimisation. Now Lana is more properly what I had long suspected: a damsel-in-your-distress, a red light in the finest noir tradition, a man’s undoing. Now it was on her terms.
‘Honeymoon’ is her most realised and complete album to date, it doesn’t suffer from the confused identity of Born to Die or the sliding constancy of Ultraviolence. Lana is at the helm here, Valkyrie-like, she floats before us, teasing our destinies with doe-eyed coquettishness. Lana’s vocals are self-indulgent, whimsical, grandiose always, and she is completely right to be so, it plays to her considerable strength as an operatically trained singer and applied here in her usual breathy, small, hard voice (someone once observed that Del Rey sings the way Herbert the Pervert talks) for one long, glorious, moment she lets the depth hang on word or phrase and we see the steel behind the velvet. It’s her finest vocal delivery yet and Lana knows it; she’s seized the reins, her songs, her way. It is magnificent, as if somewhere in our pagan history Morgana Le Fey is crouched over the body of Merlin, crooning to the wolves and the dark forests. I want nothing more than to sink into a comfortable bourbon soaked stupor while Lana’s voice trills her dark lullabies.
For what lullabies they are, because Lana is nothing if not a master at making you wish for half-formed intangibles, dream fragments, wishes and wants half-glimpsed in the smoke of memory, almost a sorcery as the mind recalls a younger self in long summer afternoons with beautiful partners you have never met, or sweet kisses with long-forgotten missed opportunities. Similarly here, her music is the Philco radio of the girl in the beach hut next to yours, drifting with her scent through the hazy afternoon heat as you loll in languor and pleasant apathy, her melodies and beats never quite stirring you from your reverie, but a background noise as comforting as waves upon the shoreline.
It is one long, lush cinematic journey through Lana’s contrived, yet compelling navel-gazing, complete with a Nina Simone cover and several nods to David Bowie across several tracks. Her beats are skeletal, pearls cast on fragile glass in storied rooms of vast mansions, half-heard guitars and violins play in the far distance, perhaps at the other side of that winking green light where Gatsby waits for Daisy, a spectre at his own gay revelries.
To prepare for writing this I listened to ‘Honeymoon’ repetitively for weeks and my first impression remains just as strong; Lana should have sung the theme for Spectre, or at the very least she should have an opportunity to sing a Bond theme in the future. Many of the tracks here, in particular ‘Honeymoon’ and the standout ‘24’ are nothing more than Bond masques wrapped in Lana’s expected fly-blown misery (interestingly Lana said she would have indeed sung a Bond theme but no one asked). They are grandiose, crooning and full of grit. They stir the blood, paradoxically without breaking the languorous spell that binds this whole album together. Honeymoon isn’t perfect (you can make up your own mind about the TS Elliott excerpt), and some of her poppier moments don’t hit the notes her standouts do (God Knows I Tried, Terrence Loves You, 24 and Honeymoon) and it still seems Lana hasn’t quite decided which stream she is swimming in, but for all that Honeymoon is the Lana Del Rey album I have been waiting for, the long-promise I saw way back in 2011, the confidence, control and self-knowledge that only experience and the passing of years can bring. I really cannot wait for Lana’s next effort and no doubt I will have to learn to fall in love with her all over again . . .but that’s my narrative, a sucker for dangerous dames, even the pretend ones.
