By Sharon Zheng
Lana Del Rey reawakens the vintage scene with Blue Banisters, picking up the cobblestones laid by Chemtrails Over The Country Club earlier this year. While Lana’s eighth studio album is the homeland of some of her most consummate poetry yet, the music itself evanesces without leaving an imprint.
While Lana’s fragile, airy vocals provide appropriate brush strokes for the relaxed, countryside ambience coloured throughout, they err too much on the lackadaisical side and precipitate an unfinished sound. The production is analogously one-dimensional, hegemonised by pianos, strings, and drums that lack experimentation and verve. Songs like “If You Lie Down With Me” and “Beautiful” blend into one another like a homogenous acrylic solution and flounder to stand out independently. Conversely, songs like “Dealer” and “Interlude – The Trio” add an avant-garde edge, but glaringly stand out from the album’s musical texture, much like blistering paint. Blue Banisters is partly a compilation, sprinkling in unreleased tracks from previous albums, which explains why the album feels like a scrapbook. It harvests stylistic nuances from Lana’s earlier eras and roughly patches them together in one go. So even with uniformity of production, the album doesn’t feel sufficiently cohesive due to the number of anomalies which simply fall out of place.
Blue Banisters opens with “Text Book”, whose chorus is the spitting image of Demi Lovato’s “Give Your Heart a Break” and whose verses emulate the sound on Lana Del Rey’s Honeymoon album without adding a contemporary flair. While the lyrical structure is a standard example of Lana’s iconic modus operandi of storytelling, it suffers from disarticulated rhymes which sound awkward in metre with the song. Quickly after, the title track reverberates the audio waves of Chemtrails too closely, causing it to wane into the album’s creatively deserted horizons. “Arcadia”, however, is a breath of fresh air, presenting an emotional bearing that underwhelms in many of the other tracks. String arrangements elevate the vulnerability of the song, and with lines like “All roads that lead to you as integral to me as arteries”, Lana paints a landscape full of Los Angeles metaphors and personal rumination. That being said, the song falters in vocal mixing as Lana’s vocals ring unbalanced in tone, key, and dynamics.
Following the hip hop influenced interlude, “Black Bathing Suit” stirs listeners with a hypnotic chorus recalling the soundscape of Born To Die and Lust For Life. “Beautiful” is a fairly forgettable track, though exalted by the delicate chorus and the pre-chorus’ poetic mastery, with lines like “What if someone had asked Picasso not to be sad?” “Dealer” is the “White Dress” of Blue Banisters: an enigma of odd vocals, as Lana’s singing in the chorus is pretty much just screaming. While this stylistic choice is both charming and uninviting to the ears, it deserves applause for its novelty and risk-taking ethos. Without a doubt, “Thunder” is the aurora borealis of the album. Everything – from the old-fashioned setting to the wistful strings – is so cinematically special and the beat drop before the second verse is catharsis at its best. On “Living Legend”, Lana’s vocals sound restricted and sporadically off-key but nevertheless showcase her impressive feat of manipulating her voice between deep and breathy throughout tracks. In particular, Lana’s wailing echoes at the end double as a guitar riff, which is an innovative (and rare) artistic triumph. “Cherry Blossom” is an endearing lullaby that proves how minimalism can indeed work – if done with purpose.
Blue Banisters is a respectable, but wildly predictable, artistic statement from Lana Del Rey whose descriptive lyrics float in beauty but whose music settles in the dust.
Hi, I’m Sharon! Currently, I’m in my third year of studying Management at LSE. I write about music, film, and television shows for The Beaver. One of my core interests is songwriting and in particular, I love exploring the poetry and storytelling behind lyrics. I am an aficionado for nostalgic, melancholic content, so I am always open to recommendations of emotional, soul-stirring material.Feel free to reach me at s.zheng22@lse.ac.uk or sharonxzheng on Instagram!
