Lana Del Rey – Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard: Album Review

Lana Del Rey releases her ninth album in eleven years, a meditation and spiritual quest inside the psyche of America. Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard aims high in its ambition to deliver a benediction for the country. In the wake of the moral crisis spanned by the 2008 financial disaster and the pandemic of 2020.

Elizabeth Woolridge Grant has created her niche as a musical artist with the scope of a novelist and screen-writer. Her recent albums have reached a high level of critical acclaim and this one may be close to her own Astral Weeks.

Jack Antonoff is on board as producer and has co-writing credits on several songs. He also produced the well-received Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Norman Fucking Rockwell.

The Grants begins as heavenly country gospel with the same Trio sound of Linda, Dolly and Emmylou. The harmony singers here are Melody Perry, Shikena Jones and Pattie Howard. I’m gonna take mine of you with me/ Like Rocky Mountain High/ The way John Denver sings.

Immediately drops down to an almost spoken lower register. Slowly the harmonies come back in to elevate the song back up to the gospel mountain high. It’s a contemplation of death and crossing over. Sets the siren tone for much of what follows.

With sixteen songs at close to eighty minutes it is a double album in length.

The title track lands us smack in the centre of sex and death. Open me up/ Tell me you like it/ Fuck me to death/ Love me until I love myself/ There’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard. This is the girl who scared Morrissey on the Smith’s Pretty Girls Make Graves.

There is a sense of dread, reinforced by the mention of a girl who sings Hotel California. Not because she likes it, but it holds the key to escape. You can check out any time you want but you can never leave.

Is this also a reference to 461 Ocean Boulevard, Eric Clapton’s great album from 1974 which includes his massive hit I Shot the Sheriff?

Then Del Rey name-drops Harry Nilsson, whose phrase don’t forget me on a song of his, opens the key for her and it forms the closing refrain. The celestial-voiced harmony singers appear in counterpoint.

Sweet is just that. A beautiful melody on piano and you can lose yourself in her pitch-perfect voice. A high trill at times is the only jarring tone.

A&W leads to more dread as she goes down the path of the title track. It’s not about having someone to love me anymore/ This is the experience of being the American Whore. It seems like the girl who could escape has ended up in a Mulholland Drive fever dream. Look at my hair/ Look at the length of it and the shape of my body/ If I told you I was raped/ Do you really think that nobody would think I didn’t ask for it?/ I didn’t ask for it.

Minimalist electronic pulse-beat music. Seductive and garish in the way of neon lights framing starlets and hookers. Hard to tell the difference.

Then a manic tone creeps in and you hear Jimmy Jimmy cocoa puff/ Jimmy get me high/ Jimmy only love me when he wanna get high/ You’re fucking up big time. Fashioned around the doo-wop classic Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop by Little Anthony and the Imperials from 1959. It’s edgy and unsettling and her voice starts to get witchy. An epic at over seven minutes.

You want some redemption after that? A strange but compelling piece called Judah Smith Interlude. Judah Smith is a charismatic pastor for Churchome located in Seattle, Washington. A large Christian church network through many States in the country, he is controversial when preaching against homosexuality and abortion. The spoken word pieces here focus on love as opposed to lust, and an appeal to the family as the spiritual centre. Accompanied by a sympathetic piano, and intermittent laughter from Del Rey. But there is a kick at the end. I used to think my preaching was mostly about you/ I’m gonna tell you the truth/ I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me.

With gospel tones all over the album, having a holy roller is not out of place. For American music, it’s as integral as Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Al Green, Bob Dylan, Elvis, for starters.

Grandfather, please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing. That’s the song title and the vocal performance is superb. Accompanied on piano by virtuoso French and English artist Jean-Phillipe Rio-Py who performs as RIOPY. Here she describes herself accurately. I’m folk, I’m jazz, I’m blue, I’m green. There are flutes here which connect it to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

Kintsugi is a folk song by her own admission. The singing is superb again, but it’s when she sings that’s how the light gets in, that the song breaks open and you feel a warmth of redemption. It is a broken heart that lets this in, so let it break a little more.

The theme is reprised later with Let the Light In, accompanied by Father John Misty.

The album closes on two songs closer to indie-pop.

TacoTruck x VB has a Tex-Mex rhythm and swing to it. It is also a bit of a parody as she drops an elongated wha-wha-wha-whatever at times. But then she also references Crimson and Clover and Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).

Lana Del Rey with Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard takes a musical voyage deep into the psyche and spiritual core of America in a quest for redemption. It is as much confrontational as beautiful.  As much literary and cinematic as it is folk noir and gospel pop.

Rev Orange Peel