Lana Del Rey - Paradise

Even after selling nearly three million copies of her debut album worldwide, Lana Del Rey still faced a challenge during 2012: namely, proving to critics and fans that Born to Die wasn't a fluke. In that spirit, she released Paradise, a mini-album close to Christmas, one that finds her copying nearly wholesale the look and feel of her vampish Born to Die personality. The sound is also very familiar. Strings move at a glacial pace, drums crash like waves in slow motion, and most of the additional textures in these songs (usually electric guitar or piano) are cinematic in their sound and references. Del Rey is in perfect control of her voice, much more assured than she was even one year ago, and frequently capable of astonishing her listeners with a very convincing act, even while playing nearly the same character in each song. There's really only one difference between Born to Die and Paradise, but it's a big one. Instead of acting the softcore, submissive, '60s-era plaything, here she's a hardcore, wasted, post-millennial plaything. She even goes so far as to tell her audience that she likes it rough (in words that earned the album a parental advisory sticker), to ask whether she can put on a show, and at her most explicit, proffering a simile that compares the taste of an intimate part of her anatomy to Pepsi. Granted, at the age of 26, she still has a few things to learn about lyricism, also resorting to cliché and baby talk in a manner that may fit the persona in a song, but doesn't result in great songwriting. (For examples, check "Body Electric," with the lines "Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn's my mother, Jesus is my bestest friend" and "We get crazy every Friday night, drop it like it's hot in the pale moonlight.") For all the progress and growth Del Rey shows in the vocal realm, her songwriting appears to be in stasis and the productions behind her have actually regressed from Born to Die. (The inclusion of a cover, "Blue Velvet," is not only a perfect match for her style, but also a hint that she performs up to better material.) Still, all of this is merely the fodder for her continuing controversy and popularity. Del Rey puts it better here than anyone else, with another simile: "Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer, life imitates art."Even after selling nearly three million copies of her debut album worldwide, Lana Del Rey still faced a challenge during 2012: namely, proving to critics and fans that Born to Die wasn't a fluke. In that spirit, she released Paradise, a mini-album close to Christmas, one that finds her copying nearly wholesale the look and feel of her vampish Born to Die personality. The sound is also very familiar. Strings move at a glacial pace, drums crash like waves in slow motion, and most of the additional textures in these songs (usually electric guitar or piano) are cinematic in their sound and references. Del Rey is in perfect control of her voice, much more assured than she was even one year ago, and frequently capable of astonishing her listeners with a very convincing act, even while playing nearly the same character in each song. There's really only one difference between Born to Die and Paradise, but it's a big one. Instead of acting the softcore, submissive, '60s-era plaything, here she's a hardcore, wasted, post-millennial plaything. She even goes so far as to tell her audience that she likes it rough (in words that earned the album a parental advisory sticker), to ask whether she can put on a show, and at her most explicit, proffering a simile that compares the taste of an intimate part of her anatomy to Pepsi. Granted, at the age of 26, she still has a few things to learn about lyricism, also resorting to cliché and baby talk in a manner that may fit the persona in a song, but doesn't result in great songwriting. (For examples, check "Body Electric," with the lines "Elvis is my daddy, Marilyn's my mother, Jesus is my bestest friend" and "We get crazy every Friday night, drop it like it's hot in the pale moonlight.") For all the progress and growth Del Rey shows in the vocal realm, her songwriting appears to be in stasis and the productions behind her have actually regressed from Born to Die. (The inclusion of a cover, "Blue Velvet," is not only a perfect match for her style, but also a hint that she performs up to better material.) Still, all of this is merely the fodder for her continuing controversy and popularity. Del Rey puts it better here than anyone else, with another simile: "Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer, life imitates art."

Afinal Lana canta

Eram dez da noite quando chegou o momento pelo qual a vasta maioria presente no Super Bock Super Rock ansiava: a estreia em Portugal de Lana Del Rey.

Eram dez da noite quando chegou o momento pelo qual a vasta maioria presente no Super Bock Super Rock ansiava: a estreia em Portugal de Lana Del Rey. Meses depois da controversa atuação no Saturday Night Live, que mostrou uma voz pouco segura e algum nervosismo, esta noite Lana Del Rey revelou-se bem mais confiante na sua postura em palco.

Tudo na cantora é uma celebração do glamour, desde a pose teatral até à pausa para acender o cigarro antes de interpretar uma das suas canções mais conhecidas: Born To Die, que dá título ao disco.Em palco estava acompanhada por um quarteto de cordas (três violinistas e uma violoncelista), um pianista e um guitarrista, que juntos criavam as melodias pop barrocas e polidas, a que depois Lana dava voz no seu estilo intimista mas que se soube adaptar às vicissitudes de um espetáculo num festival ao ar livre.

Eu pessoalmente gosto da perspectiva do vídeo...

Lana del Rey: "glamour" com abelha

Publicado originalmente em Sound + Vision

A dupla londrina Sean and Seng é responsável por um magnífico portfolio de Lana del Rey que teve especial visibilidade nas edições alemã e russa da revista Interview. Agora, o site FashionProduction divulga a totalidade das imagens, incluindo um mini-filme promocional que exibe a gravidade de um glamour eminentemente clássico. Por vezes, a nostalgia permite-nos habitar o tempo numa impossível e extasiada quietude — como uma abelha.

Lana Del Rey (a preto e branco)

Publicado originalmente em sound+vision


Para além da música e através das canções — Lana Del Rey acrescenta mais uma bela peça à sua já mais que respeitável obra videográfica. No seu novo teledisco, referente ao single Blue Jeans, ela ressurge em território obstinadamente romântico, a preto e branco, recuperando um visual indissociável das memórias mais nobres de Hollywood. Faz-lhe companhia Bradley Soileau, com Yoann Lemoine a assinar a realização (dois nomes que repetem a colaboração do anterior Born to Die).


>>> Site oficial de Lana Del Rey.

Chega hoje a Portugal

O álbum "Born to Die", que apresenta a cantora norte-americana Lana Del Rey, é editado hoje em Portugal, meses depois da artista se ter dado a conhecer com uma música na Internet.

A história de Lana del Rey, nome artístico de Elizabeth Grant, nova-iorquina de 25 anos, começa em 2011 quando a música "Video Games" é colocada no Youtube, interpretada então por uma desconhecida.

A cantora tinha gravado em 2008 um álbum que nunca chegou a sair, mas foi depois no verão passado que deu nas vistas com aquela canção, que registou cerca de vinte milhões de visualizações na Internet.

"Video Games", que tinha sido rejeitado por várias editoras e apenas saiu por uma pequena chancela independente, acabou por lhe render depois um contrato como a editora Interscope Records, outro com uma agência de modelos, e a garantia de publicação de um álbum em 2012.

Lana Del Rey compôs os novos temas sempre em parceria com outros autores e o resultado é "Born to Die", um álbum melancólico, dolente e influenciado por um hip hop mais minimal.

A BBC diz que o álbum podia ser a banda sonora perdida de um filme negro e Lana Del Rey é uma mulher fatal: "Marylin Monroe e Marlene Dietrich competem pela posse do microfone".

Lana Del Rey: Born to Die – review

'There’s always the chance that she’s playing a character, although that seems doubtful' … Alexis Petridis on Lana Del Rey. Photograph: Photographer: Shivy K

It's hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Lana Del Rey. She's hardly the first pop star in history to indulge in a spot of pragmatic reinvention that muddies her comfortable background, but you'd certainly think she was. You can barely hear the music over the carping, which appears to be getting louder as her debut album approaches: a cynic might say that's just as well, given the recent Saturday Night Live appearance in which she demonstrated her uncanny mastery of the vocal style deployed by Ian Brown during the Stone Roses' later years – she honked like the foghorn on Portland Bill lighthouse. But one off-key TV spot is surely not a career-ending disaster. Perhaps the arrival of Born to Die will silence the controversy and shift attention to the songs.

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Lana Del Rey

Born to Die

Polydor

2012

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Or perhaps not. There's something impressive about her desire to brazen it out, but you do wonder at the wisdom of including Radio, one of those how-do-you-like-me-now? songs in which the singer revisits their terrible struggle to achieve fame. "No one even knows how hard life was," she sings, "no one even knows what life was like," which does rather invite the response: indeed not, but given that your father was not only extremely wealthy but so supportive that he took to the pages of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise to promote your debut album I'll hazard a guess at (a) probably not that hard and (b) basically quite nice.

There's always the chance that she's playing a character, although that seems doubtful, because when Lana Del Rey is in character, she really lets you know about it. The one truly disappointing thing about Born to Die isn't the sound, which understandably sticks fast to the appealing blueprint from Video Games andBlue Jeans: sumptuous orchestration, twangs of Twin Peaks-theme guitar and bum-bum-TISH drums. Nor is it her voice, which is fine: a bit reedy on the high notes, but nothing to get you reaching for the earplugs. It's the lyrics, which in contrast to Video Games's beguiling description of a mundane love affair, are incredibly heavy-handed in their attempts to convince you that Lana Del Rey is the doomed but devoted partner of a kind of Athena poster bad boy, all white vest, cheekbones and dangling ciggie. The reckless criminality of their lifestyle is expressed via hip-hop slang – "yo", "imma ride or die", and, a little Ali Gishly, "booyah" – and the depth of their love through romance-novel cliches ("you are my one true love"). It's Mills and Booyah.

The problem is that Del Rey doesn't have the lyrical equipment to develop a persona throughout the album. After the umpteenth song in which she either puts her red dress on or takes her red dress off, informs you of her imminent death and kisses her partner hard while telling him she'll love him 'til the end of time, you start longing for a song in which Del Rey settles down with Keith from HR, moves to Great Yarmouth and takes advantage of the DFS half-price winter sale.

The best thing to do is ignore the lyrics; easy enough given how magnificently most of the melodies have been constructed. Video Games sounded like a unique single, but as it turns out, it was anything but a one-off: the album is packed with similarly beautiful stuff. National Anthem soars gloriously away from a string motif that sounds not unlike that sampled on the Verve's Bitter Sweet Symphony. There's something effortless about the melodies of Diet Mountain Dew and Dark Paradise: they just sweep the listener along with them. The quality is high throughout, which is presumably what you get if you assemble a crack team of co-writers, including Heart FM king Rick Nowels, author of Ronan Keating's Life Is a Rollercoaster, Dido's White Flag and Belinda Carlisle's Heaven Is a Place on Earth.

You could argue that his presence recontextualises Born to Die, drawing it away from the world of the indie singer-songwriter she was initially thought to inhabit and firmly into the mainstream. It fits better there, where no one bores on about authenticity and lyrics matter less than whether your songs' hooks sink deep into the listener's skin. What Born to Die isn't is the thing Lana Del Rey seems to think it is, which is a coruscating journey into the dark heart of a troubled soul. If you concentrate too hard on her attempts to conjure that up, it just sounds a bit daft. What it is, is beautifully turned pop music, which is more than enough.

Lana Del Rey: The strange story of the star who rewrote her past

Lizzy Grant was a flop, changed her name to Lana Del Rey and was acclaimed as a new star. But the backlash from fans who felt duped has been unprecedented

Critics of Lana Del Rey have turned insults about her into an art form, speculating for example that her pout is down to collagen.  Photograph: Nicole Nodland

You can still find traces of Lizzy Grant online. There is a video, dated 8 June 2009, that shows a young, casually dressed blonde woman in agreen T-shirt and jeans singing alone on stage at a New York music show called The Variety Box. Grant's voice was strong, but she seemed shy and spoke quietly to the audience to a smattering of applause.

Grant looked like any one of hundreds of young artists trying to make it in the clubs and bars of New York, singing their hearts out in the hope that one day they would be spotted. After all, that's how big names from Bob Dylan to Lady Gaga got their breaks. But success never happened to Lizzy Grant. Her one and only album sank virtually without trace.

However, fame did happen to someone called Lana Del Rey, a 25-year-old sultry, seductive songstress who is the current hottest name in US music and whose debut album is one of the most eagerly awaited events in the industry this year. It comes out on 31 January.Born to Die video.

Del Rey's image is nothing like Grant's. The video for her new song, provocatively called Born to Die, is slick and lavishly produced. The short film begins with her posing half-naked with a tattooed, shirtless man in front of the stars and stripes, then shows her sitting on a throne in a figure-hugging white dress flanked by two tigers. By the end of the video, she is covered in blood, wearing only a red bra. It is over-the-top and wildly eccentric.

But that suits Del Rey's sound. Her soaring vocals and melodies, reflecting genres as diverse as hip hop and indie music, have won millions of fans. And Del Rey has quite a story to tell. After first appearing on the internet last year with an apparently home-produced video of a song called Video Games, she became a cult hit. She married her music to a mysterious image, self-styled as a "gangster Nancy Sinatra", that paid homage to 1960s fashions and seedy showbiz glamour. In an interview recently shot poolside at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, Del Rey explained her attraction to the notorious celebrity haunt. "It's a place that has inspired so many of my videos and influenced a lot of my visuals," she said through a mouth now framed by pouting, bee-stung lips.

Of course, Lana Del Rey and Lizzy Grant are the same person.

That revelation has made Grant/Del Rey one of the most controversial figures to emerge in US music for years. Some people feel victims of an immense confidence trick. When Video Games first went viral it became an underground sensation praised for its authentic feel. Del Rey's amazing voice crooned the haunting song against a backdrop of grainy out-takes of home movies and Hollywood scenes. It currently has a staggering 20 million views on YouTube. The follow-up, Blue Jeans, with a similar feel, netted 6 million views. Del Rey's few live gigs suddenly sold out. She won the Next Big Thing prize at the Q awards. She seemed set for the big time. But then questions were asked. A few critics began to wonder if, far from being some organic wunderkind, the transformation from Grant to Del Rey had been planned all along. Her stage name was chosen by her management. Rather than being an outsider struggling for recognition, Del Rey is in fact the daughter of a millionaire father who has backed her career. People were suspicious of the way Grant's failed album, and all her social media websites, appeared to have been scrubbed from the internet just before Del Rey appeared. There has been much speculation as to exactly when Del Rey teamed up with her current label Interscope and how much influence their savvy marketers might have put into her original emergence.

"There are a lot of things that don't seem organic about it," said Steven Horowitz, who wrote a cover story about Del Rey for Billboard magazine. "She's putting on a show. She's here to entertain us."

Suddenly, many of the fans that had boosted Del Rey turned on her in spectacular fashion. Music blogs poured vitriol on her talents. Some influential music websites, such as Hipster Runoff, have turned insulting Del Rey into an art form. Last weekend Del Rey appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. She gave a hesitant, uncertain performance – suddenly more Lizzy Grant than Del Rey – that triggered brutal criticism.

Celebrities even got in on the act. Actress and musician Juliette Lewis tweeted: "Watching this 'singer' on SNL is like watching a 12-year-old in their bedroom when they're pretending to sing and perform." Even news anchor Brian Williams weighed in, sending an email that was later published on gossip website Gawker that called Del Rey's performance one of the "worst outings in SNL history".

But it is not just Del Rey's music and SNL performance that is being hauled over the coals. It is also her appearance.

Pictures of Lizzy Grant when contrasted to Del Rey have led many to speculate that she has had collagen injections in her lips and perhaps even plastic surgery. It is a charge she vehemently denied in a recent interview. "I haven't had anything done at all… I'm quite pouty. That's just how I look when I sing," she insisted.

Del Rey has many defenders too. "She is just a gorgeous creature," said Noah Levy, senior news editor at In Touch Weekly magazine. Horowitz said that whatever the truth of her emergence there is little doubt about her talent or commitment. "I think she cares about the art that she is creating. I don't think that is fake at all," he said.

Despite the outrage directed at her, Del Rey is employing one of the oldest tricks in the book: the creation of a stage persona. Some of the greatest names have done it. David Bowie and Madonna are notorious shape-shifters. So is Lady Gaga. Changing from Lizzy Grant to Lana Del Rey is not unusual when you consider that Bob Dylan's real name was Robert Zimmerman and Iggy Pop was born James Osterberg. "I think Lana Del Rey is manufactured. But when Lizzy Grant came out with music it failed. So she reinvented herself and it worked," said Levy.

In fact, Lana Del Rey's rise says much about the nature of modern fame in the US. The internet has allowed figures like her to come rapidly to the fore of the cultural landscape, whether or not their emergence is planned by a record executive or happens spontaneously from someone's bedroom. It has speeded up the fame cycle. It is worth noting that the huge backlash to Del Rey is happening before her first album has even been released. This reveals a cultural obsession with the "authenticity" that fans, artists and corporations all prize above all else.

Cultural critics say genuine authenticity is almost impossible to achieve. "The whole idea of authenticity is elusive. It is in many ways a complete illusion," said Professor Robert Thompson, a pop culture expert at Syracuse University. Others have simpler explanations for the stir Del Rey has caused, seeing misogyny against a female artist so willing to use sexuality as a way of selling her music. "There is a 'mean girls' attitude to some of it," said Horowitz.

Either way it does not seem likely that Del Rey will be leaving the music scene any time soon. Sales of her new album are set to be astronomical. It has crept into Amazon's top 25 in the US on pre-sales alone. She is booked for appearances on major talk shows. "Lana Del Rey can go anywhere that she wants to," said Levy. "She's going to one day be the cover of Rolling Stone." Lizzy Grant may have failed to make it. But her next creation seems ready for stardom.

IN