But the result is, at times, out of control, lost in flourishes and embellishment that loose the jazz to affectation, even in the best tracks of the album.ĭel Rey plays a winning strike with Honeymoon's four opening songs: powerful ballads, lain on ethereal and soft arrangements made of smooth strings and jazzy winds.
The jazz singer she always claimed she wished to become finds its way in the vocal takes, with her operatic trained voice going full-on. And Del Rey's voice is definitely more confident here than it has been on previous albums, to the point that it could easily be labelled as self-indulgent. While the extreme quotation persists, now the singing voice is that of only one, actual woman. With that in mind, Honeymoon seems no different from its predecessors. Del Rey is uninterested in revealing the truth. Mingling fiction and reality in a unsettled pastiche, she leaves us to decide what's real about what's before us. She builds endless, intertwined narratives, each one with its own main character, plot and setting – a sophisticated jazz singer, an old time Hollywood diva, a urban Lolita with her sugar daddies – in which she will always be the lead role. The collaging technique Del Rey crafts in her lyrics: continuously quoting from novels, poems, titles and songs, including her own – moves a step further when is seen in its entirety.
Someone even gave it a name: metamodernism. What is she doing there? Wasn't she supposed to be a villa-owner, rather than a visiting everyman? That is, for the reality hunger generation, truth and lies can lie side by side with no boundaries needed, and still be real. On the cover of her latest record, Honeymoon, we see the singer, red, wide brimmed hat and sunglasses on, standing inside one of those open-top vans belonging to Starlite, the company that takes tourists on tours among the Hollywood stars estates in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Embodying all the complex and contradictory facets of the American Dream, one at a time, Del Rey has managed, so far, to leave everyone pondering how much is true and how much is made up not only in what she sings but also in herself, even in her appearance.