Lana Del Rey – Blue Banisters: Album Review

Lana Del Rey is all tangled up in blue on her latest album Blue Banisters. An expansive and soaring body of songs, literary and cinematic and riding along on an angelic voice.

Born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant in New York City and raised in Lake Placid. An impressive three-octave range contralto who filled the role of cantor at her local Church choir. Came back to the city to study Philosophy and Metaphysics, and where she launched her professional music career.

This is a distinctive take on Americana. Rooted in Folk and Country on most of the songs. A stark vision of America with an essential autobiographical element. Some of the songs are left-overs from the Born to Die and Ultaviolence sessions but at the heart they also reflect the turbulence and profoundly disturbing upheavals of the Twenties so far.

Arcadia. A slow piano and the song opens up like a novel. And she lays herself down. My body is like a map of LA/ My chest, the Sierra Madre/ Run your hands over me like a Land Rover. And like a Toyota. A love song to America which floats in the air of Old Folk or Country. Sounds full of promise and possibilities like a John Dos Passos novel but also has some of the spiritual sadness of Leonard Cohen.

Text Book, which opens the album dives deeper emotionally. A longing for father is linked to revelations at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Brentwood, California. Measured and detached to begin, but soon begins to dance. Swirls and twirls on that high floating register. I didn’t even like myself/ Or the life I had. Then opens up further. Let’s rewrite history/ I’ll do this dance with you. Reaches a brilliant juxtaposition with father and America’s racial legacy. The sounds of Ol’ Man River enter the song and it goes out in a Spiritual refrain.

Title song Blue Banisters. As a novel it is F. Scott Fitzgerald and in its spectral tone it’s the way Springsteen portrayed some of the more haunted tracks of Nebraska. Very little instrumentation, just a piano and something which shimmers like wind blowing through tubular bells. Starts with Oklahoma and John Deere tractors but that’s a mis-direction. Semi-spoken passages are followed by a voice which takes flight easily and effortlessly and pierces sweetly like Kate Bush keening on Wuthering Heights. You can’t be a muse and be happy too/ you can’t blacken the page with Russian poetry and be happy too. Beautiful singing and there is an off-kilter sense of humour. Touches down to where she really is on the Earth. I said I’m scared of the Santa Clarita fires/ I wish that it would rain. Darkness and destruction leads to regeneration and there’s a baby on the way and now my blue banisters are green and grey.

There is a short instrumental, Interlude to close the curtain on that dramatic trio. Mexican trumpets and Spaghetti Western Morricone music.

Black Bathing Suit does address the quarantine but only as a monumental pain in the rear. Tired of this shit/ If this is the end, I want a boyfriend.  A Pop tune with a sexy and playful nature to her voice and demeanour. The one track where the drums rise up and crash and rumble. Backing vocals from girls who sound slightly unhinged.

Dealer is something else again. Sung as a duet with Miles Kane, of the Last Shadow Puppets and the Rascals. Del Rey singing is anguished and desperate, like she is playing a strung-out opiate addict. Kanes voice takes on the different roles. The friend, the dealer, the doctor who’s no spiritual healer. With the tragedy of the opiate crisis in America, the Doctors were the pushers.

Nectar of the Gods is the hedonistic flip-side. Heroin gold in my veins/ I get wild in your body/ I get wild and fucking crazy, like the colour blue. The voice also has regret on the down-side, after the intoxication from the wild spirit both chemical and emotional.

Maybe the writing on this album also works at the level of Brett Easton Ellis, who writes of the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the young and decadent America with truly disturbing consequences revealed. Del Rey doesn’t go that far in, yet.

If You Lie With Me. A Folk song. A jaded spirit sings in a sexy slurred voice. The spaces in the spare music allows it to open up in complexity. Like a few drops of water in the best single malt Scotch. Van Morrison’s Ballerina, from her perspective.

On Thunder, the strings begin in the fashion of This Magic Moment.

Sweet Carolina ends this album. A Folk song full of the love spirit. Reaches the sky and has that unearthly timbre of Joan Baez, and then some. From up on high, she brings the voice down to give the best brush-off. Crypto forever! / Screams your stupid boyfriend/ Fuck you, Kevin.

As good as any album that Lana Del Rey has done to date. The setting is minimalist but the songs occupy the vast expanse of America in body and in mind. Sung beautifully from start to finish.

Rev Orange Peel

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