Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters Review
In ‘Blue Banisters’ Lana Del Rey asks us to help her reimagine her legacy, clashing old with the new, heaven with hell and profane with the sacrum.
Last album, ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’ showed Lana Del Rey refusing to consciously fit into any archetype that listeners and press prepared for her. In her own way, she personifies them all and none of them. We tend to forget about her chameleon-like artistry, distracted by the anti-feminist accusation and the social media storm that followed last year's ambiguous comments where she failed to recognize Black female artists' cultural contributions. A year and album later, we still can’t ignore Lana’s decade-long music legacy. In the end, she’s not your American darling, 60s glam popstress or the sad Lolita-like girl embodiment. ‘Blue Banisters’ presents Lana Del Rey as the complex, versatile artist that she is. It’s a collection of both older songs (‘Nectar Of The Gods’, ‘If You Lie Down With Me’) and new material.
In the opening line of the ‘Text Book’, ‘I guess you could call it textbook/I was lookin' for the father I wanted back’, Lana is still looking for someone to guide and complete her while reminiscing on taking part in the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and past selves. That sense of nostalgia continues through the whole record but peaks in titular ‘Blue Banisters’ where she tries to compose herself after yet another love disappointment, ‘There's a hole that's in my heart/All my women try and heal’. She’s repainting life with her happy colour, blue, with help of her guardian female angles. Girl power all the way through. As an L.A. girl to the bone, in ethereal ‘Arcadia’, an ode to the city in California, she traces her steps through to the sunny Eden-like streets, ‘All roads that lead to you as integral to me as arteries/That pump the blood that flows straight to the heart of me’. In instrumental ‘Interlude – The Trio’, Lana plays around soundtrack for ‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, written by Italian composer Ennio Morricone and interlaces trap, hip-hop beats into it, reminding of her early records, ‘Born To Die’ and ‘Lust For Life’. Though bringing the melancholy of the former golden, nomadic days, Lana stays in the present and reflects on paparazzi and recent public obsession with her body image and private persona. ‘Black Bathing Suit’ feels like dipping your overheated toes in a cold sea after stepping on hot sand. It shows mature artist aware of fans fetishizing her image so she puts a protective barrier between her sacred self and too eager voyeurs, as she sings, 'Cause my body is my temple, my heart is one, too/The only thing that still fits me is this black bathing suit/You don't know me any better than they do, baby’.
The real highlights of the album are 'Violets For Roses’ and ‘Dealer’. The first is simply a beautiful ballad on the account of self-love and falling back in grace with the inner side, overlooked when in an overwhelming relationship. In the second one, Lana takes a deeper dive outside of her, already vast, emotional comfort zone, as she almost screams ‘I don't wanna live/I don't wanna give you nothing’. Despite the record being an hour-long in-depth reflection and speculation over her most intimate moments with herself and others, those two lines tear through any illusions left, healed traumas and show Lana at her rawest, most innocent. Always fighting the demons. The closer to the end it gets, that impression gets blurred more and more with somewhat blunt tracks like ‘Wildflower Wildfire’ or ‘Cherry Blossom’.
In ‘Blue Banisters’ Lana Del Rey asks us to help her reimagine her legacy, clashing old with the new, heaven with hell and profane with the sacrum. As often in her previous work, she mythologises her past. Only now it mingles with the present too. ‘Blue Banisters’ soul is stuck in purgatory between two cigarette drags, sips of wine and sweet stolen kisses.