When the drums finally kick in, Del Rey sings about putting the radio on and holding the guy’s memory in her head, and then interpolates David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to communicate insurmountable distance.
One highlight is the bridge to “Terrence Loves You,” a spare, opera-flavored elegy for a musician she loved. Previously, the cleverness and irony often kept her from conveying emotions that seemed real, but here those things just make the feelings heavier. But it helps that Del Rey is a great writer-funny, specific, knowingly over the top. This may all sound intolerably self-involved, or boring, and sometimes it is. The Worst Day in Earth’s History Contains an Ominous Warning Robinson Meyer You suspect she’s singing to someone who’s long gone. The title track opens the album with a cello moan and high, creeping violins and then floats for nearly six minutes as Del Rey promises glorious, aimless freedom-“We could cruise to the blues / Wilshire Boulevard if we choose.” But she sounds utterly alone. The English singer-songwriter is now the seventh artist with at least two No. At one point she counts the hours spent beneath the covers with a lover, and at another she refers to the entire era after a breakup as a single “blackest day.” Of course, time can’t actually be tamed. The song’s streak matches the 10-week No. She’s obsessing over, and trying to defy, the finitude of bliss. The concept of her third album, Honeymoon, is in its title. Desire, loss, love: All are rooted, somehow, in a desire to regress. In the four years since she arrived, famously shakily, on the SNL stage, her pout and her unapologetic nostalgia-flowers in hair, Super 8, Nancy Sinatra and Leonard Cohen, Fellini and Polanski films, icky gender relations, cigarettes-have become objects of parody. Her career is all about music as a time warp, with her languorous croons over molasses-like arrangements meant to make clock hands seem to move so slowly that it feels possible, at times, they might go backwards. Rather, music embodies (or, rather, is embodied within) a separate, quasi-independent concept of time, able to distort or negate “clock-time.” This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least to lose all semblance of objective time. Music creates discrete temporal units but ones that do not typically align with the discrete temporal units in which we measure time.
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