Lana Del Rey - blue banisters

By Maya Marie

When Lana Del Rey announced her eighth studio album just weeks after the release of Chemtrails Over the Country Club, along with the sentiment that it would articulate her thoughts on a critical Harper’s Bazaar article that accused her of cultural appropriation and glamorizing abuse, alarm bells began to sound. It foreshadowed two potential missteps: firstly, that in addressing ‘the haters’ Del Rey would alienate her remaining fans once and for all (previous attempts have seen her digging herself into holes of racism and classism); and secondly, that the quick turnaround would produce a bad album. These concerns manifested multifariously in Blue Banisters. In true Lana style, the album was not released in June, as was initially intended. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel rushed. For a record that Del Rey claims “tells my story and pretty much nothing else”, the last thing fans expected was for a compilation of unreleased songs from multiple Lana ‘eras’ to make up over half of the tracklist, leaving only seven songs worth of new material.

If this is indeed Del Rey’s “story”, it largely consists of songs that were superfluous to other albums, and don’t tell us anything about her we don’t already know. The ‘new’ portion of the album, however, demonstrates a clear shift in sound and a turn towards more biographically-focused lyrics in order to paint a fuller picture of her life. Del Rey addresses childhood trauma in ‘Text Book’ and ‘Wildflower Wildfire’ over  raw, disjunctive production that acts as a soundboard to her breathy vocals, which sound more vulnerable than ever. The title track, ‘Blue Banisters’, is a sensitive, piano-driven ode to friendship that traces her introspection during interactions with her friends. It is similar in soundscape to the captivating love song for LA, ‘Arcadia’, and the perhaps too on-the-nose defence of sad art, ‘Beautiful’. ‘Sweet Caroline’, co-written with Del Rey’s sister and father, is a song dedicated to her sister’s newborn. We gain a gloriously funny glimpse into Del Rey’s family dynamic as she sings: “You name your babe Lilac Heaven / After your iPhone 11 / “Crypto forever,” screams your stupid boyfriend / Fuck you, Kevin”. Although the shift in production on these new songs leaves them feeling to some extent unfinished, the sound is coherent and perfectly accompanies Del Rey’s self-reflective journey. I only wish she had either stopped here or waited to create more songs in this style, rather than adding so much filler content.

Hands down, the best songs on Blue Banisters come from a completely different project: an unfinished 2017 collaboration with The Last Shadow Puppets. ‘Dealer’ and ‘Thunder’ are disparate from the rest of the album in both sound and content—they really don’t belong here—but to be honest, I’m glad I can finally hear them. ‘Dealer’ is a dreamy array comprising contrasting elements: Miles Kane’s pleasingly slippery vocals and Del Rey at her most unbound. She lets loose on the chorus, almost screaming the muffled lyrics: “I don’t wanna live / I don’t wanna give you nothing / Cause you’ll never give me nothing back / Why can’t you be good for something / Not one shirt off your back”. This vocal turn is a shock at first, but ultimately so, so satisfying. ‘Thunder’ is more mellow in tone, but still hits hard. Del Rey paints an evocative portrait of her lover on this track; he “acts like fucking Mr Brightside”, but is much more of a downer in private, causing her to ultimately walk away for her own sanity: “if you’re on fire, then you’re on fire, you should just keep burning”. These songs are so good that I wish we’d received the whole of this intended collaborative project instead of the incongruent collage that Blue Banisters has become.

Even less successful are the three cuts from 2014’s Ultraviolence. Don’t get me wrong--these songs aren’t bad--but they don’t do anything for this album, only causing it to drag on and lose focus lyrically. We revisit the same exes that we knew so well and hated so much from the Ultraviolence era, and get a blast from the past hearing in real time the difference between the earlier moanier vocals she became famous for, and the lighter, more sensitive vocal approach of recent albums. It evokes an exciting nostalgia to reunite with such a great album, but these songs would have much better served an anniversary re-pressing of Ultraviolence in three years’ time.

Blue Banisters reunites listeners with familiar, unknown, and lost Lana eras alike, and, in that, is an album like no other for Del Rey. The album features some truly amazing songs—‘Arcadia’, ‘Blue Banisters’, and ‘Dealer’ are highlights—but, lacking a coherent theme or style, gets lost along the way. You’ll add a few songs to your playlists, but you’re unlikely to return to the album as a whole too often, especially when there are plenty of other perfect from start-to-finish Lana Del Rey records to choose from.