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AlbumReviews: 'Honeymoon' by Lana del rey
Depending on your mood, Honeymoon, Lana Del Reyâs third album, could either sound extremely boring, grating, pleasing or a combination of all three
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Depending on your mood, Honeymoon, Lana Del Rey's third album, could either sound extremely boring, grating, pleasing or a combination of all three.
Traditionally, this is what a Lana Del Rey album is supposed to sound like; woozy pop music with flourishing strings and mid-tempo synth arrangements that no other artist of her stature would make. In fact, I mean this as praise for Del Rey: nobody sounds like her, and all backlash aside, she can really write music.
And she did receive a lot of backlash after her debut Born to Die. But, it's 2015 and indeed Honeymoon is a good record. Some reviews of either this record or Ultraviolence, Del Rey's excellent second album that I can't believe people have stopped talking about, have in one variation or the other talked about Del Rey in extraneous details.
Honeymoon and, to some extent, Ultraviolence are records that made me avoid that urge, and its one heck of an accomplishment.
Honeymoon was probably written with a specific mood in mind, possibly the sadcore, retro-pop-leaning sounds Del Rey is known for. But compared to Born to Die, it sounds a lot more cohesive.
'God Knows I Tried' and 'Terrence Loves You' are terrific jazz ballads with soaring vocals and piano chordal backing. 'High by the Beach', the catchiest Lana Del Rey song ever, leans toward hip-hop with twinkling synth sounds accompanying the chorus.
One specific complaint I had with Ultraviolence is how it teeters midway through the album. It just gets repetitive somehow.
Honeymoon, on the other hand, is fire all over; the songs have more variation, but they're consistent enough to be considered as having come from the same mold. When 'Freak' segues into 'Art Deco' and when the ambitious 'The Blackest Day' makes way for the maudlin '24', I was, for lack of a better word, relieved.
Even the interlude with slow-burning, mid-tempo synth 'Burnt Notion', where Del Rey recites a T.S. Eliot poem, doesn't sound lazy as interludes normally would.
It doesn't, however, end well: Del Rey's cover of 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' is a half-baked cover and it never takes off the ground. But the nonsensical lyrics all over this record ('Put on your white tennis shoes and follow me / Why work so hard when you could just be free?' on 'Swan Song' or 'singing soft grunge just to soak up the noise' on 'Music to Watch Boys To') are awesome and stick to the character Del Rey set up specifically for Honeymoon.
Speaking of which, it's great to listen to Honeymoon from start to end, but I think it will be as polarizing as that one time when this Lana Del Rey character was first introduced. It's become hard to separate those two people, but that's not the point. With Honeymoon, it's finally nice to hear what this character has to say in full.
