It would seem Lana Del Rey is primarily a persona.  A red party dress wearing socialite that variously moves through the Hamptons, waves her hanky at her high school girl friends, or gets trashed in California as some sort of cinematic imagining from David Lynch movies – at once the weepy eyed starlet and the crack snorting bad girl who comes undone when mixing with the mafia, daddy, bad boys, or all three.  Four LPs in and one is still uncertain as to whether she is entirely a fictive piece of Elizabeth Grant’s song writing fantasies or embedded in something far more real.  Keeping us guessing is what Lana Del Rey is all about.

Honeymoon does little to answer the question (and why would it when all this wondering sells so well) but does come across as increasingly authentic – as if Lizzie Grant is finally giving, and given, voice –stripped of the trip hop beats of Born To Die and the guitar riffs of Auerbach on Ultraviolence, Del Rey suddenly stands alone and sounds great.  Side One of the double album showcases this most strongly – there is barely a drum in earshot just an auditorium of strings, various tinklings, and vocals at full frontal in the mix.  It’s a shame in many ways then that she feels it necessary to stick the somnambulistic beats back in again during the album’s rather soggy middle (typified by the lead single High By The Beach and the nonsensical Art Deco – rhymes with ghetto don’t you know) but thankfully by the end of Side Three onwards we are headed back to where we began.  The Italian inflected Salvatore has all the weary symphonic grace of a funeral scene from the Godfather and by the time of The Blackest Day and 24 she stops sounding plain depressed and just bawls the place down, wonderfully as it happens.  The oddity here is the closer, a dark cover of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (again, like The Other Woman on Ultraviolence, originally done by Nina Simone) which might cock-a-snook at either her detractors or indeed her own persona.   Honeymoon may not mark the wedding of Lana Del Rey with her progenitor Elizabeth Grant but it does show an engagement and is all the better for it.