Welcome back to the CD Odyssey. As we’ll be doing for the next 50 or so reviews, here’s a few records I recommend from the year corresponding to the review number.
- Townes Van Zandt, “Our Mother the Mountain” (Disc 236)
- The Beatles, “Abbey Road (Disc 441)
- Leonard Cohen, “Songs from a Room” (Disc 536)
On to a record that I missed upon its release eleven years ago, much to my chagrin now…
Disc 1969 is…Honeymoon
Artist: Lana Del Rey
Year of Release: 2015
What’s up with the Cover? If this is a honeymoon it looks like Lana is out on her own for this part of it. Maybe her partner wasn’t keen on taking the StarLine Cruise and slept in, or maybe they decided to take in a baseball game.
This may sound bad, but I’ve been happily married for a very long time, and there’s nothing wrong with a short stint at different events – gives you something to talk about when you meet up later.
How I Came To Know It: I came late to Lana Del Rey, not giving her more than a passing thought until around 2021. Since then I’ve been devouring her new records and going into her back catalogue with equal zeal. “Honeymoon” was the latter experience.
How It Stacks Up: I have six of Lana Del Rey’s nine studio albums. I don’t know them well enough to definitively rank them, but I was pretty damned impressed with “Honeymoon” and I’m placing it second.
Ratings: 4 stars
Lana Del Rey has a haunting voice that is like sunshine on a cold day, and on “Honeymoon” she pairs her instrument with a set of immersive, moody pop songs that cast a spell that gets more intense on each listen. It left me shaking my head at myself that I’d taken so long to come around to her sound.
Part of this slow seduction is the nature of Del Rey’s music. She sings in a high head voice that creates an otherworldly pop-Goth, drawing you siren-like to her music. These songs aren’t immediate bangers. There’s nary a guitar riff, not even a strum, and the result is a kind of background hum that doesn’t immediately draw your notice. You need to settle down and properly listen before this record will properly reach down inside of you.
Once you’re there, you can appreciate the ghostly, eerily sensual quality of the record. These sequences are like an art film romance, sexy and disconcerting at the same time. If you like your pop music mysterious and a little dangerous, then “Honeymoon” will suit you well.
The title track leads the record off with a starkly beautiful couple of bars of violin – or maybe a synthesizer mimicking a violin. It is hard to tell, and that straddling of the artificial and the deeply emotional is what gives “Honeymoon” a portion of its magic. The song is almost six minutes long, unfurling at a languorous pace, but by the time it is in full flight you’re sorry it has to end so soon.
Like a lot of the songs on the record, the unnamed object of Del Rey’s affections is dangerous, distant and hard to understand. Del Rey paints this dark character with splashes of imagery, tinted by the narrator’s ardor. Best lines:
“There are violets in your eyes
There are guns that blaze around you
There are roses in between my thighs
And fire that surrounds you”
Sexy stuff. Del Rey doubles down on this dangerous desire vibe throughout the record, following up the opener with the sultry sway of “Music to Watch Boys To” another crooner that shows off Del Rey’s high head voice as she sings a call and response of “I like you a lot” and “so I do what you want” leaving you the listener to wonder just what sacrifices are being made in the name of desire. And on it carries through the record, spinning you inward into the depths of human longing.
Later on the record, relationships sour. Tracks like “High by the Beach” are just as deeply introspective, but now they are about creating some distance from destructive influences. The song’s refrain seems to suggest that sometimes you don’t need to get out of your head, so much as you need to get deeper inside of it.
The final track of the record is a cover of the Animals’/Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” Del Rey does a fine job of it and given all the edgy characters she’s inhabited through the record, it feels a bit on the nose, and not necessary after all the high-quality originals. It’s good but there’s knowing nod to the listener that isn’t necessary. The record operates better in an air of mystery.
However, this is a minor quibble, and by the time you get to this point of the record you are well and truly under Del Rey’s spell. Maybe you need a bit of a landmark pop cover to come back from it, even, and in this regard even its somewhat awkward inclusion serves a purpose.
Best tracks: Honeymoon, Music to Watch Boys To, God Knows I Tried, High By the Beach, Freak, Art Deco, Salvatore
