Lana Del Rey – Did you know That there’s a tunnel under ocean Blvd?

Review Score:

A-

The Unprecedented Times –

March 27 / 2023

Though I admittedly don’t have much of a frame of reference for the artist’s past work, Lana Del Rey is no fresh new musician. Now on her ninth album, she knows what she’s doing and it’s clear on Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?. She fluently articulates her life as a single woman nearing forty. She channels what it must feel like to get constant questions about marriage, children, and legacy. Or, what she calls “the experience of bein’ an American whore”. A sermon acts as an interlude, which highlights some of the religious themes in Lana’s writing. Her faith, or her occasional lack of it, affect her outlook on many of the album’s tracks. The traditional Christian life, to Lana, is a point of interest and a point of contrast to the life she’s led. And this makes for many thoughtful, well written songs.

Some of the strongest ones for me are the simplest ones. Much of the album finds Lana ambling gently over an instrumental that seems to be following her lead rather than the other way around. On “Sweet”, I picture Lana Del Rey leaning on a piano and wistfully singing to an empty theater. Or “Kintsugi”, she rambles and drifts from hazy anecdote to hazy anecdote. But the crux of the song is the Japanese practice of repairing broken things and highlighting the imperfections in the process. Lana wishes she too could embrace her own flaws with the same grace. 

The album includes a handful of samples as well. Some are used better than others. I quite enjoyed the waltz-y “Paris, Texas”, which essentially fully makes use of “I Wanted To Leave” by SYML. By the end of the album, Lana Del Rey dips more fully into the electronic sounds she introduced on the latter half of “A&W” by using a Tommy Genesis sample for “Peppers”, which I find to be an unfortunate and abrasive conclusion to an otherwise beautiful album. Sadly, the final track also includes these driving, electric drums and a deep rumbling bass that feel unearned and out of place. Ironic, for an album with a major focus on highlighting broken, flawed, disparate pieces. Maybe in a different track order, these songs could be excused by the same metric Lana uses to measure the sum of her own failures. “Margaret” and “Fishtail” feel like much more appropriate concluding songs. Or maybe it’s all part of the bigger picture. Just like people, you take the good with the bad. It all makes up one whole, imperfect, beautiful product.

Review Score: A-

Gubb wrote this review. You can’t get mad at Gubb.