Three minutes and eight seconds into the video for Lana Del Rey’s indie-hip single “Video Games,” sandwiched between a shot of a pool and one of a wall, there are a few frames of Del Rey glancing away from, and then back into, the camera’s lens. It’s clearly meant to look casual in the way that videos often make use of an “I just happened to turn the camera on” conceit – i.e., we’re meant to understand that we’re watching performance or moment, per se. But the glance is just a hair too practiced, too calculated: her timing is too good, her composure too perfect; it comes off not as frankness or honesty but of practiced imperfection.

And sadly this seems to be the modus operandi for basically all of Del Rey’s debut album, Born To Die (which is actually her second album, the first being Lana Del Rey A.K.A. Lizzy Grant, released January 2010). It’s sad, and frustrating, because, well – LDR can sing her friggin’ ass off. Say what you want about her Saturday Night Live performance (FYI: it sucked), but there can be little doubt that on wax Lana Del Rey has one of the best sets of pipes in indie rock; the self-proclaimed “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” title is maybe a little much, but the sentiment is right. She’s husky without being guttural, and her high range is clear and rich too. There are some flops (the whole baby-talk thing on “Off To The Races” is, frankly, a little icky, and her delivery on “National Anthem” is just a little too saccharine to be convincing) but on the whole you sort of just … want to like her, want to believe in her.

But Del Rey’s vocal performance is strangely incidental to the meat of Born To Die – which is to say, the overwrought and blasé instrumentals. One gets the sense that everything LDR might conceivably have contributed to the album beyond a) some basic songwriting decisions and b) her actual voice was slowly wrung out of these songs, leaving behind a bunch of lackluster string-drenched beats that could pass for the B-sides from Coldplay’s lost electronica album. Strangely, it’s aesthetically flawless; few records have the unity of purpose that Born to Die achieves. And yet its perfection has the same posed, stylized quality as those few almost-candid seconds of “Video Games.”

In the end, Born To Die will be remembered as the moment that “indie” finally ceased to be an ethos (ie., “independent music”) and became a clearly-defined style. It seems strangely fitting that Al Shux, the album’s primary producer, was also responsible for Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” a flawlessly-produced, Grammy-winning, and thoroughly lifeless simulation of hip-hop. But Ms. Grant’s relationship with the music industry is less stable than that of either Keys or Hov, and sadly it seems unlikely that her career will survive the year. Perhaps the best we can hope for is another name and another album a couple years down the line.

2 / 5 bars

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National Anthem

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Blue Jeans

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