How to Disappear echoes Bartender’s escape motif, but this waltz with Christmas bells has an unusually happy ending. The remainder of Normal Fucking Rockwell’s unreleased tracks can, as a result, seem a little surplus and one-note – strings and synth washes soundtrack multiple love songs, one of which is actually called Love Song – but there are standouts. The six tracks drip-fed thus far over a period of 11 months include some of the very strongest work Del Rey has done since Video Games, her audacious breakout sensation of 2011 and its accompanying album, Born to Die. Most invested listeners will already have heard about Del Rey going “24/7 Sylvia Plath”, and writing on the walls in blood on the previously released Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It. Ultimately, there are more intriguing things afoot on Norman Fucking Rockwell than mere parties: Del Rey’s “taking off bathing suit” and going “meta”, writing “the next best American record” on The Next Best American Record, or buying a truck to enable an incognito midnight flit with a bartender. Most recently, she put out Looking for America, in response to this summer’s mass shootings – a stark contrast to the high old time her solipsistic, dissolute songs were previously enjoying.
Suddenly, in 2017, she engaged with the world as it was, endorsing Wiccan moves to place a binding spell on the then new president. Del Rey has drawn on old Hollywood, summer time and a half-debutante, half-gangster’s moll alter ego. Rockwell specialised in highly stylised scenes from American 20th-century life, reflecting myths back to an adoring public before later becoming more politically aware. Rarely has the offer of a party, with “your favourite alcohol off the top shelf”, seemed so unenticing, compared with everything else that’s going on here.įirst, there are the Rockwell parallels Del Rey is clearly angling for, despite the fact that the title track actually concerns a “self-loving” and “resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all”, rather than Rockwell himself. What’s odd, however, is that while California is technically one of the strongest songs (there are actual beats it’s about something tangible) it’s also one of the least interesting tracks on this unorthodox, involving album, named after a devotee of lived American iconography, the 20th-century illustrator Norman Rockwell.
“Crazy love,” muses Del Rey, audibly shaking her head at the memory, yet nursing some unspecified guilt. Having often set her tunes in specific locales – Brooklyn Baby, West Coast and Venice Bitch are just three previous stops on the open-top Del Rey bus tour – it comes as little surprise that at the heart of Norman Fucking Rockwell, the fifth of her acknowledged studio albums, Del Rey should be throwing a party for some hot guy, if he’s ever in California again. I t was probably inevitable that Lana Del Rey would one day write a song called California.
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