REVIEW: Lana Del Rey's "Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd" via Universal
Lana Del Rey is another one of those artists that I think doesn’t need an introduction, she feels like one of the biggest in the world. Instead, since AsterTracks is built on personal experience, I want to instead tell you a story. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you probably remember my first break up era. I was in a relationship for fourteen years before I picked up on it being emotionally abusive. One of the areas of control was actually Lana’s music. My music consumption went generally uncontrolled, in fact, it was my ex who liked Lana and I only really liked NFR. When she read an interview where Lana said the country was controlled by sociopaths however she suddenly wanted neither of us to have anything to do with the New York singer so it was hard to hear anything new. Ocean Blvd is my return Lana album and I wanted to review it. This album's long, almost ten hours went into this review, so I hope you’ll give it a chance.
For the first four song run of this record things go off as pretty sinless. I think Lana is good at playing the role of a jaded girl with a good voice sitting behind a piano. She sings about what she knows, she makes it sound good. There are however signs even in these four songs that things are going to go south as the record progresses on. There’s weird breaks in performances and even lyricism. The “basic bitch” line in “Sweet” and a certain line in “A&W” sort of break my immersion. “A&W” by the way I think is a highlight on the album overall. In spite of some flaws, Lana gets to fully show her proficiency in piano playing and her craft at songwriting with some really stellar performances and fluid lyricism. When the beat switch comes its very well executed, the long con of the instrumental interlude where drum machines slowly come in is effective, especially when it becomes a hip hop adjacent track. To that end, however, I think the song overstays its welcome; an issue I take with Ocean Blvd as a whole.
As I said, I don’t take issue with tracks one through four, however Ocean Blvd starts to fall apart the instant we get to track five. The Judah Smith interlude might actually be one of my least favorite decisions on any record this year so far. Why is it that I have to sit through Lana Del Rey watching and laughing through one of Smith’s, albeit ridiculous, sermons for over four minutes as if she’s an atheist teenager? I don’t understand what it serves, I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do with this. In the same vein the other interlude, one by Jon Batiste, is also something I could do without. These artistically clipped studio moments do not do a thing for me, I think they too do nothing to serve the overall vision of the entire record. I feel as though if both of these tracks were taken off the record, or at least cut in half, I’d be richer for the experience. There’s only two of them, they’re so close together at only the first half of the finished product. If they were shorter? If they were maybe more spaced out? Then sure.
Coinciding with the length, the presentation also gets old fast. There is not nearly enough variety to justify this run time, some of the piano ballads sort of blend into the background and most of them are pushing six minutes. There comes a point where I know the point and she’s not saying anything compelling enough to justify my having to listen to more and more of these. There are some differentiating factors throughout. There is a more in depth production on “Fishtail.” There is another overall highlight in “Peppers,” which is a counterpart to “A&W” with another fun hook, more studio clip shows that actually make use of themselves in an interesting way. What I’m trying to say is that there was quality here, there were ideas worth exploring here, but when you isolate that from the repeat the album’s run time becomes unjustifiable.
I glanced over Batiste’s involvement but I didn’t even get into the issue I take with the promise of the features on this record. I understand that Batiste co-wrote a song and interlude for the record. But I feel he, and SYML for that matter, being referred to as features are a massive stretch and play as if they’re name dropped for the sake of it. One line of backing vocals are far from a feature. The rest of the features? Okay, great. Fully utilized, you get what you came for. Another promise not delivered on are these reprises from NFR itself. They feel like unnecessary callbacks for the sake of it, they aren’t artistic decisions. The reprise of “Venice Bitch” on “Taco Truck x VB'' is one of the silliest things I’ve ever heard and it serves as the closer of the entire album. It sort of just feels like it’s milking every last second of your attention.
I think Ocean Blvd is good, but it could be great if we cut the runtime, if we actually considered the weight of our decisions and if we cleaned up the sloppy and immature direction. I didn’t even get into the odd performance breaks but the Paris, TX line gives me a good laugh every time. I still think I have the same opinion of Lana as I did outside of NFR. She’s a good songwriter who can either be entirely tiring and boring, one that has ideas that she refuses to implement, or a great one when she wants to be. But you know what? This time I had the choice to make that decision for myself.
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