Description
Honeymoon is really one long crystalline glide that lasts for 12 songs, one baffling snippet of a TS Eliot poem and one Nina Simone cover, carried along by music so cinematic and unobtrusive that sometimes it’s barely there. Del Rey’s voice is the star, swooping, warbling, contemplating “murder and carnage”. The beats, such as they are, seem to be happening in the next rented property along the seafront. One of Del Rey’s signature moves has been to ally torch songs to up-to-date sounds. Where her skeletal trap beats exist – on Art Deco, or Del Rey’s latest celebration of California, Freak – they are mere ghosts of skeletons, marbles dropped down a glass staircase across the valley. There are two ways of taking Del Rey. Critics justly object that she celebrates the same played-out Stepford moll glamour that American culture has always pinned up. A more nuanced take is that Del Rey’s embodiment of all these haute trash stylings is as much a conscious art project as anything Lady Gaga might once have cooked up. Or as her Simone cover has it: “Please don’t let me be misunderstood.” This time, perhaps, she won’t be.
