While Video Games may have pertained to the adrenaline-raging glitz insinuated by that line of pulling up "in your fast car", Born To Die rather splutters into action, strings and horns trilling out over a trip-hop beat before reverb-laden echoes offset her lethargic sighs of "why?" and "who, me?" as if in futile, Ballotelli-like negation of all the controversy already to have encircled her. It's a swoonsome number, Del Rey's now-infamous husk booming, cloaked in perhaps treacherously plush production: "I feel so alone on the Friday nights / Can you make it feel like home if I tell you you're mine?" An oft-cited qualm with Del Rey as both entity and artist is that irrespective of the truth behind the impeccably made-up, porcelain picture of mystique is that whatever – or more significantly whoever – she may be attempting to purvey, she does so quite unconvincingly and over quietly grandiose backing her words here feel insincere in the extreme. Would you even bear to believe her were she to "tell you you're mine?" Would she genuinely mean it? Or would she be purely seeking some quivering, coo-voiced pubescent to cajole into taking "a walk on the wild side", to "keep making me laugh" while taking never before-smoked tokes on a particular class B? Only she holds the answers to these vaguely pertinent questions although musically the record's opening eponymous track sounds increasingly evocative of Massive Attack as it clatters on.
She's then Off To The Races, confessing: "My old man is a bad man but I can't deny the way he holds my hand" over what sounds a little like one of Logic's few reggaeton presets. Hopefully not referring to Mr. Grant at this particular moment in time, this "old man" is said to grab her by her heart, to not bat an eyelid at her "Las Vegas past" nor at her "L.A. crass way", for he "loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart." While stringently striving to disjoint context from musical content, the process begins to align itself with the interpretation of an interview transcript as certain quips stick. However these sorts of lines only appear to embolden the presupposed great insincerities of Grant's modern-day resurrection, and they're excruciating to experience. This difficulty with splicing sonic fact from tabloid-spewed 'fiction' is problematised further by the patent reality that musically, Born To Die is quite nondescript: it's not repulsive, nor unlistenable; it's merely humdrum within a blinding haze of indescribable hype.
The track itself then plunges into substandard hip-hop (the impression of a barely grasped and scarcely nuanced understanding of the genre accentuated by references to "sippin' on your black Cristal") before flowering into synthetic melodrama à la The World Is Yours-era Ian Brown as she warbles soullessly, if pseudo-suggestively of watching her flounder about in the "glimmering" swimming pool. Again her words flutter with minimal conviction, insinuating that were one to witness her disrobe it'd once again be an outstandingly awkward, and moreover asexual moment. Over a grubby beat, this is Grant going all out on the seductive and it fills your body with the sullied guilt of an ungainly lap dance on a 'Last Night of Freedom'. By the time she's explicitly baying to be kissed on her "open mouth" you may find yourself involuntarily raising sleeve to slobber-soaked lips in compulsive repugnance. She then slips into them well-worn Blue Jeans and we're finally treated to a melody to savour. It's saccharine to the point of the sickly although it sticks like the most adhesive gumball pop and distant yelps deep in the mix perfectly compliment its sultry, if gangly twangs of guitar.
Those stentorian church bells we've become more accustomed to than those that dolefully trill self-reproachfully every Sunday then begin to ring. Video Games has begun and it's inconceivable to not sit back and revel in a breathtaken numbness: unchanged, it remains unthinkably compelling. Diet Mountain Dew meanwhile, the track that initially opened our eyes – and more significantly ears – to Grant's persistently morose sighs and forlornly self-effacing lyricisms has been warped almost beyond recognition, mutated into a grotesque beast, an exercise in overindulgence within the inner wirings of the mixing desk. It's more layered than the cake at the wedding Grant evidently suspects is never to materialise and the inclusion of most of its components seems extortionately trifling. National Anthem could quite plausibly be an N-Dubz cut, stilted raps and meat-fistedly Auto-Tuned vox slapped over woeful nationalism and a chorus that sounds like Enya's Caribbean Blue prattled off to the time signature of Bitter Sweet Symphony. An almost epiphanic moment then occurs however as Grant reverts to revelling in gloom: the almost ecclesiastical Dark Paradise sounds snatched from The Weeknd's revered trilogy were it seamlessly mashed into the index of a hymnbook, clunky smacks of rhythm parting for perhaps the definitive chorus of Born To Die while the crackly, Hawley-esque balladry of Radio sees Grant at her most human, vulnerably revealing: "Your heavy words can bring me down" and that boy oh boy, "I've been raised from the dead." The bridge over her troubled waters that unites the record's finest verse work to another sumptuous chorus is creaky to say the least yet you can't help but find yourself helplessly endeared to her when she foolhardily urges: "Baby love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio". It's a two-finger salute incarnated in mildly euphoric chorus and it's arms-aloft excellence.
As with all good things this fleeting brilliance is soon frittered away with the directionless, Adele-ish Carmen and the equally disengaging, Presley-referencing Million Dollar Man on which Grant's voice assimilates itself to that of a vacuous hotel bar crooner. Questionable hip-hop whimsy returns on the otherwise-intriguing This Is What Makes Us Girls although the fading strains of Born To Die succinctly encompass that which incurs great infuriation: she's irreversibly established herself as this almost intangible paradox that plays truant in place of shows, has everyone from Albarn to Zomby rehashing her way into the iPods of the unwilling, and has her "old man" funding her every faux pas (read faux-naïf if you will). Yet she's here longing "for a taste of the real life" while exhaling blatant product placement ("Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice"), venturing to associate with all members of the female gender. It seems a highly, if suitably superficial attempt to bring others into this intemperate and narcissistic effort. However for her to proclaim to "put love first" when we're only too conversant with past endeavours solely serves to alienate us further from what's become pure pastiche. Born To Die a martyr destined to be forever persecuted by the media masses 'til death do us part? Well, perhaps. But why ought we give a damn about this glorified "degenerate beauty queen"?
