She has finally learnt to write a song: Lana Del Rey’s new album reviewed

No, Lana, I didn’t, thank you – all cleared up. The most extravagantly talented of that lachrymose, self-harming genre, miserycore, returns with an album described by critics as ‘heavy’, as if we might have expected Mungo Jerry or the Venga Boys. The difference between Del Rey and the rest of those dispossessed chicks warbling bleakly in their bedrooms about all manner of woe is that Lana has a degree of self-awareness and, Christ be praised, even humour. Otherwise, why would she start a song with the words: ‘I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine.’ Really – you haven’t? Also, she has learned, over the years, how to write a song – rather than just to staple together snatches of winsome melody which later disappear up their own gently puckering sphincters.

This is a very good album. It is true that we are still in the land of the plangent piano, almost always beginning with a major chord descending to the minor fourth – an agreeably melancholic change but one that does begin to pall after 40 minutes. But these songs, for once, actually live, they exist. Some even soar – especially the gospel-tinged opener ‘The Grants’, the exquisite ‘Paris, Texas’ and the lead single ‘A&W’, which comes close to claiming possession of the word ‘beautiful’.

She has got herself in trouble with one track, which samples the garrulous celebrity preacher Judah Smith, who has been accused of homophobia on account of having quoted from the Bible. Good, Lana – let them rail against you. You have found melody, and a spine.