Interscope
Pop, 2015

If you inject a huge dose of sedatives and ten gallons of pretentious flatulence into Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die, you will get Honeymoon. She has abandoned any semblance to good hooks and riffs for navel-gazing gimmicks like mouthing off poetry and cooing into the microphone as if she’s solving the trigonometry of marijuana while taking a dump on a rainbow-colored toilet bowl.

As a result, all the tracks here sound the same after a while – she’s whispering or cooing into the microphone in a multi-layered vocal effects. There is not much diversity here, just one kind of song with little variation between them. The songs may be called “This one where she goes A-AH-AAA-AAA-AAH a lot”, “That one where she goes O-OOO-OOO-OOO-OOO non-stop”, and not. It’s a shame that Lana Del Rey is starting to mutate into this one-note stoned creature when she’s finally getting the fame she has fixed her face and clawed her way through everything for.

Honeymoon is an album best listened piece-meal. This way, Terrence Loves You can sound sincere yet tragic, with a chorus that seems to resemble heartbreak in action, while God Knows I Tried has a haunting kind of chilling beauty to every note.

But all these songs together into one album, and it’s just some lady repeating the same line over and over while some sleepy piano just go on and on in the background, with the occasional set of instruments coming on to complete the whole “best listened while completely stoned” effect. There is nothing here that resembles the erotic energy of Video Games or the sexually charged tragedy that is Gods and Monsters. Therefore, why listen to the self-indulgent twaddle in this album when Born to Die is still available?