![]() ![]() As a singer, Del Rey sounds more like the singer of her pre-Lana Lizzy Grant days here, when she was was performing torch songs in secretarial skirts at A&R showcases, looking too young to seem so haunted. The setting is pitch-perfect and a million mothballed years away from the current pop landscape it's strange, a barometer of youth culture trading in such old music. The morose orchestral grandeur of the album feels like an arrival point, and also possibly a dead-end: the sentimentality and drama throws back to old Hollywood film scores. ![]() The moment is Honeymoon's emotional apex, but it still moves at the pace of a funeral march, and the release it depicts is that of embracing rock bottom. It's not until "The Blackest Day", eleven songs in, that Honeymoon's static depression gives way to apocalyptic ecstasy, as she gasps "In all the wrong places/ Oh my God" in multi-tracked harmonies on the chorus. On the title track, when she croons "Our honeymoon/ Say you want me too", she's dopily hopeful as Brian Wilson singing "We could be married/ And then we'll be happy." The album luxuriates in this bleak space between dream and reality, which stretches endlessly from one melancholy track to the next. The romance here is closer to addiction-something that's sought for its ability to blot out the rest of life's miseries. It's an album about love, but "love", as Del Rey sings it, sounds like mourning. Accordingly, Honeymoon is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence, and the pall does not lift for its 60-plus minutes.
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