album review: 'blue banisters' by lana del rey

…well, sixth time’s the charm, right?

Yeah, you all heard that: this is the sixth review of a Lana Del Rey album that I’ve made - and considering how generally disliked these reviews seem to be, y’all might think I’m a glutton for punishment or something. And I can see how some might wonder why I still care - I mean, I’ve had damn near an arc with my reviews of her albums spanning from 2014 to now, across the peaks and valleys of critical acclaim and controversy where I even got to whip out an ‘I told you so’ moment when I covered Chemtrails Over The Country Club earlier this year. But it was that album where I think I hit a limit of what was left for me to say, where it all snapped into place and I ‘got’ what she was on both an intellectual and emotional level. I didn’t often like it - for the most part I was largely frustrated and bored, albeit falling into an odd sense of agreement with her own assertions that she’s never been reviewed all that well, in which I’d actually agree for different reasons, even with a few of my own reviews. But it felt conclusive, at least to me, where she’d go her way and I’d go mine, and maybe she’d take a long break to recharge her batteries.

That didn’t happen, and in a prediction that was wrong almost immediately, a new album was announced for later this year, and to my greater surprise, it actually got released this year - after a few delays, but hey, that was to be expected. Now I’ve talked before about when artists drop multiple albums in a year and how it’s not normally a good sign, but there were other things around this release that have caught me off-guard. For one it was announced very quickly after Chemtrails Over The Country Club, a record that seemed to come and go very quickly in general conversation this year - I talked about that album for over twenty minutes, and I barely remembered it. And given the waves of controversy building towards that project, the buzz for Blue Banisters feeling muted at best made me think the faster way people move on from artists isn’t ‘cancelling’, but when the work doesn’t stick. I mean, sure, her last album didn’t really sell as well or pick up the acclaim of Norman Fucking Rockwell, but she does have a diehard audience; even just by cultural proximity I should have heard more buzz about this new album! And yet… all quiet on the front, with the promo being scant and the singles getting no traction and a conspicuous lack of Jack Antonoff anywhere in the production credits. That - along with a list of production credits that include family members, Miles Kane of The Last Shadow Puppets, and Mike Dean - give me the impression she may have turned in an album that her label doesn’t know what to do with, which gave me the thought that this could be interesting, or maybe Lana Del Rey outside of her frustrating comfort zone. So what did we get this time?

…oh boy. Well, I’ll say this, if I was at her label, I don’t know what the hell I would have done with Blue Banisters either - if you were going in expecting the b-sides of Chemtrails, this is not really that. If anything, the best way to describe this album is to point to all the weird, slightly offkilter genre-bending that she threw on her b-sides across Lust For Life, but make it for the whole album. So in comparison with her catalog, this is a strange listen, the sort of album that’s more experimental and fragmented and weirdly insular than something built for grand statements or setting a vibe, so while I’d struggle to call this ‘good’, it is interesting in its own way; I can see a fanbase having fun hot takes calling this their favourite.

Now I want to start this by saying that this is still very much a ‘Lana Del Rey’ album with all of its quirks and frustrations, we’re not getting a genre shift away from the sleepy, shamelessly retro baroque pop that’s her standby. A lot of the issues are structural at this point - it’s too long, there’s no sense of pacing or momentum, and if you’re not engaged with her delivery or presence, the lack of striking hooks and consistent song structure will make this a slog, especially in the final third. Now this has been an issue for a while, even when Jack Antonoff was co-producing and let her songs meander, but with a lot of the arrangements scaled back it gives you a lot more space to focus on all of the cracks in the formula. Now some of that is intentional, to sound raw and deconstructed and more direct, which we’ll talk about when we get to the writing, but it’s hard for me to fully embrace the atmosphere when I keep noticing how haphazard the vocal mix is, especially with as many overdubs as there are, or how any guitars on the album are more texture than tone, or how despite the team of engineers and mixers and producers that worked on this project, it feels way messier and less consistent than it should. This was one of two major issues I didn’t expect to hear following from Chemtrails, and it adds cracks in the vibe she’s trying to construct - on the one hand, this album feels a lot less stylized so I guess she can get away with it, but on the other hand it’s distracting as all hell when the vocals start clipping on ‘Arcadia’ or ‘Wildflower Wildfire’ - including Mike Dean providing some grainy percussion that sounds like total ass on that song - or ‘Living Legend’, the last of which is notable because she tries to process her voice to sound like an electric guitar… and honestly it just made me wince, it’s an awkward choice.

Granted, I’m conflicted about the vocals on the album as a whole: I used to be convinced that Lana Del Rey was a pretty weak technical singer with limited breath control at best - which remains a glaring issue whenever she goes for her baby-voiced cooing that I can’t stand - but I’m starting to think that’s not the full story, especially when I’ve heard testimony of how much better she can sound live in recent years. And while there are points where her delivery feels sloppy as hell on this project - more of an issue of her cramming words into her breathy ad-libs, the other negative carryover from Chemtrails - that’s not really the issue either; it’s more that her choice of vocal style doesn’t always flatter what she has, even if she piles on the overdubs. I’ve always thought she sounds great in her throaty, lower register, but here we get more of her midrange and I’ll be honest, she sounds really damn good with more power than she’s ever brought to bear. But that’s not often the register in which she sings, instead going for the higher baby voice on a song like ‘Thunder’ or ‘Cherry Blossom’ or the quasi-operatic thing she tries in that register on ‘Sweet Carolina’, and again, she doesn’t seem to have the breath control in that range to do it well. Now I could highlight that there are other singers who have that breath control whom she’s influenced and can do it better - Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish - or the singers who just have a better command of this retro pop style - Weyes Blood, Julia Holter, I could list off maybe a dozen indie country acts - but that’s not the only thing Lana Del Rey tries… and this is where we have to talk about ‘Dealer’, which stands out like a sore thumb on this project not just because of the attempted slow-burn groove and Miles Kane with a processed nasal tone and sounds awful, but Lana Del Rey tries to belt and scream and it’s an outburst of which we haven’t heard from her before, which is why it’s now gone viral. And while I appreciate the moment for how it’s trying to be raw and unexpected and visceral, there’s a way to scream well to save your voice and control your pitch, and this isn’t it; a lot less Lingua Ignota and a lot closer to bad karaoke.

And it’s one of those moments on the album that certainly doesn’t make this as boring, but it’s a rough edge that only works if you’re enamored with the personality, and I’m just not - same thing with how the tempo and vocal overdubs tumble over themselves on ‘Text Book’ and ‘Black Bathing Suit’, or how clunky the horns sound on ‘If You Lie Down With Me’, or in the most bizarre case, the sample of Ennio Morricone from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly on ‘Interlude - The Trio’, where she overlays a trap beat… and it adds to nothing! And yes, it might be intentional for that deconstructed vibe, and I’ve seen some comparisons to Fiona Apple’s rougher approach to Fetch The Bolt Cutters… first off, it didn’t always work for her either, and for another, Fiona Apple has a raw, charged magnetism and wild charisma that’s in an entirely different lane than Lana Del Rey’s “composed” approach to glamour. That’s what places the experimentation on this album in the uncanny valley for me: Lana Del Rey is taking some risks here on a compositional and production level, but they have the feel like she’s doing what she thinks she’s supposed to do with this sort of deconstruction, rather than pulling from something where there’s a greater sense of stakes; and it’s not even that they feel calculated but sloppy, and you start openly wondering where the hell any of this is going. And that takes us directly to the writing and we’re going to start with structure and how the poetry has changed: some have highlighted that her reference points are more contemporary and personal, I’d point out that they’ve always been contemporary but she’s stripped away less of the obvious stylism and she’s always been telling personal stories which a whole subset of critics just refuse to believe because that would force them to confront the potentially ugly reasons why they like them so much. No, my issue is that the deconstructive approach hasn’t just led to increasingly sloppy poetic meters but also how her writing feels way more mundane, which I don’t think works to her benefit. For example, ‘Arcadia’ is trying to be more high concept, with her describing her body as a map of L.A., where she’s trying to work the parallels between the city of angels and herself, basically a first-person parallel to what Lori McKenna did last year with ‘This Town Is A Woman’… but then we get the lines, ‘lay your hands on me, like you’re a Land Rover’, and the bad pun just breaks any mystique the song has. What annoys me more is the ‘Mr. Brightside’ reference on ‘Thunder’, about some guy who chases every dream with reckless abandon and is never satisfied, but ‘Mr. Brightside’ is a tragic figure in that song who doesn’t get the girl because she got entranced with someone else, so either Lana Del Rey didn’t grasp the fundamental conceit of a classic song from one of the other bands that’s as obsessed with Americana as she is, or she does get it and then just didn’t bother filling in the context for her story.

But again, what story is she trying to tell? One thing that really doesn’t help this album is that reportedly a lot of these songs have been written or leaked in some form for the past eight years, and you can tell - her writing style has changed multiple times over, which does lend some credence to this being a ‘b-sides’ album. But the fractured point of view does kind of make sense in deconstruction - this is a patchwork of scenes over the years, and some of the self-awareness of Norman Fucking Rockwell is in frame, so it’s an album that seems to want to start questioning things. She’s a little less drawn to the bad boy archetype as I’ve mentioned, and the title track actually touches on that well in respect to the success she’s found where she doesn’t want to be someone’s muse, and on ‘Violets For Roses’ where she’s in the idyllic settled scene she realizes she doesn’t want to give up her dreams to settle down in this form - granted, this is also a song where she still revels in the glamor of folks taking their masks off and a line about how she’ll ‘breakdance to the backbeat’, so it feels detached in a wonky way. Similar case for ‘Text Book’ where she’ll talk about having gone to a Black Lives Matter protest because of her hope that this connection will help her break away from the traditionalism she knows is rooted in her messy relationship to her parents, and reference the old showtune ‘Old Man River’… which is awkward given the execution of this song is still built in that traditional aesthetic, and you really don’t want to look up what happened when she went to that protest in 2020, and her dad worked on this album! And those fleeting reference points are scattered amidst the stock love songs that are still drenched that vintage iconography and by the end of the project, we’ve got ‘Cherry Blossoms’ which might as well stand as a future lullaby and ‘Sweet Carolina’, which is directly referencing her sister having a baby and settling into that domestic life, even if you find the guys involved in that situation insufferable. And it’s not like I disagree - anyone screaming ‘crypto forever’ after the week I had dealing with my channel would be insufferable, fuck you Kevin - but it’s the same thematic conclusion she’s hit the past two albums: she’s realizing that she doesn’t fit cleanly anymore into that settled conservative system, but she’s more inclined to settle within the hierarchy that gives her the majority of what she already wants and believes rather than challenge it. And that’s why the deconstruction is so frustrating - she’s over halfway to getting there, but she’s never delivered the teeth to stick the landing.

So as a whole… there’s a part of me that wants to be forgiving of this because at least some of the mess feels purposeful this time, but I can’t escape the feeling that across the board it’s a half-measure, and it came at the expense of decent song construction and consistent production and making an album that pays any of this off. It does feel more personal to her given the more intimate framing, but that also leaves you with her for longer than you might want, especially when it feels like she’s on the cusp of having a breakthrough but just will never go there. And even then, the execution across this album is rough, especially as I’d argue that across the board for the non-diehard fans, it’s short on hooks, momentum, and compelling poetry that you haven’t heard before. But at the same time, there are also a few beautiful moments that contribute to good songs, if not great ones, and it reminds me of Lust For Life, which also isn’t good but in isolated patches I’ll defend it. So… strong 5/10, I think it’s more interesting than Chemtrails and I would recommend you at least check out the mess… but it’s still Lana Del Rey, so even in mess you probably will know what you’re getting.