The American singer-songwriter returns with her eighth LP and second LP of the year after Chemtrails Over The Country Club with further slow, cinematic piano-based numbers filled with her soaring voice and vivid, heartbreak stories and images. Some of the 15 songs are older material filtered out from past albums, but there’s still plenty of potency in her lyrics. “And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend / Someone to eat ice cream with and watch television” she sings on the Black Bathing Suit, which then breaks into background crashing timpanis “I guess you could call it textbook / I was lookin' for the father I wanted back … You've got a Thunderbird, my daddy had one, too,” on opener Text Book, where Freud certainly has an influence. And on Arcadia, an extended metaphor with dark sex and driving overtones over a beautiful melody: “My body is a map of LA/ I stand straight like an angel with a halo / Hangin' out the Hilton Hotel window/ Screamin', "Hey, you, baby, let's go. My chest, the Sierra Madre/ My hips, every high and byway/ That you trace with your fingertips like a Toyota/ Run your hands over me like a Land Rover.” Musically much of the album has the same, slow, piano chord and voice melancholy, but there are further surprises, such as the retro brass on the final stages of If You Lie Down With Me, the odd harmonica sound she sings on Living Legend and the soulful loungey howls on Dealer a duet with Miles Kane.
More than a decade into her career, Del Rey now feels like a veteran and is hugely influential on the new generation. It’s hard to imagine Billie Eilish without her. Out on Polydor/Interscope.
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